It turns out that "Diamond Hands" and "HODL" are not real strategies.

How about that?

This weekend's action only just reinforces the hot mess this asset class finds itself in.

And it's not just Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Downside participation is really beginning to ramp up under the surface.

Many of these tight ranges we've been discussing these last few weeks seriously broke down this weekend.

Behind the scenes, the weight of the evidence is shifting more and more to the bear camp.

It's sure been messy out there.

There just hasn't been too much to discuss in recent weeks - volatility's contracted, and any signs of momentum have just fizzled out.

But that's not to say that there are NO opportunities; it just simply means they're harder to come by, and the probabilities of success have lowered significantly.

Despite all this messy action, we've still had a handful of trades really go our way on both the long and short sides. Buying the leaders, and selling the laggards - despite how oversimplified it may sound - is as prudent of a strategy in this environment as any other.

This chart does a great job of boiling down how we're approaching this market:

Humans are hardwired to find patterns where they don't exist.

Back in the day, it was beneficial for our ancestors to picture predators hiding among the leaves, even when they really weren't there. This Pareidolia kept them safe. Thousands of years on, it makes us terribly susceptible to chart crimes.

One such crime plaguing the Crypto landscape is this idea that "Bitcoin is correlated."

People argue that these digital assets are having a real consequence on the macro environment.

But the reality is that Bitcoin is far too small a market to have any intermarket relationships at all.

These crazy Bitcoin "HODL'ers" and "Laser Eyes" people must be going nuts right now.

Apart from a few exceptions in shorter time frames, there's been a painful lack of real opportunities floating around in this space recently, both on the long and short sides.

Breakouts are failing, and breakdowns aren't doing much either.

Legendary trader Paul Tudor Jones once said that "Markets only trend about 15% of the time, the rest of the time they move sideways."

As aggressive as trends can be in Crypto, we need to respect that markets simply need to repair their damages and reload for the next move.

In the context of Bitcoin's 200-day moving average, once price slips below it, it tends to stay below for some time - especially after prolonged periods of it remaining above.

Altcoins are NOT leading this recent bounce.

If (and this is a big if) this is a tradable low for the Cryptocurrency space, this is a critical time and place for us to see new leadership emerge. So far, it's certainly not coming from down the cap scale.

We shared this chart in one of last week's notes, mentioning that:

Throughout Bitcoin’s rebound in the previous few days, the leadership has not been in the Altcoins.

Apart from a few exceptions, most Altcoins have been flat since Bitcoin’s recovered from its crash lows.

Nearly a week since and the same still holds true:

This is the video recording of our June 11, 2021 All Star Charts Crypto Weekly Strategy Session.

Though consolidation periods can be painful, they allow us to evaluate the next leaders and laggards when a directional trend resumes.

We've written a fair amount about potential leaders in the last few weeks, but it may be time to increasingly shift the conversation and focus more on the laggards.

While most areas have bounced this week, the DeFi sector is stubbornly lagging:

No matter how many charts we analyze, the market ultimately gets the final word, not us.

We're simply here to position ourselves where the risk vs. reward is exponentially in our favor. Unfortunately for trend-followers, there's not a whole lot of opportunities floating around right now.

Until we get a move in either direction from this near-term range, longs are likely getting chopped up, and shorts probably aren't working either.

As we've mentioned repeatedly, 30k is the level to watch on the downside for Bitcoin, while 41,000 and eventually 48,000 is the upper level of this range.

Click on Charts to Zoom in

The thesis has been that if Bitcoin loses 30,000, we need to be aggressively shorting these digital assets.

In that environment, not only are Cryptocurrencies themselves likely getting slammed across the board, but crypto-related stocks are also going to come under pressure.

Unlike some other crypto and blockchain funds, the Amplify Data Sharing ETF $BLOK does a great job of finding stocks with direct or indirect ties to this still-niche industry. 

It's happening...

We're finally getting a resolution from this multi-week messy range in many Crypto assets, and it's not looking good for bulls at all.

A retest of the Crash lows of 30,000 looks incredibly likely for Bitcoin in the coming days and weeks:

To kick off every week, our first priority before diving straight into our Crypto charts is to ask the simple question: Who won and who lost?

We simply scan for the largest gainers in our Crypto Universe for the prior week, and even more importantly, the largest single-day moves from the prior week. So even if a coin didn't perform the greatest for the full week, identifying substantial surges of demand throughout the week gives us great clues to where any potential future relative strength could lie.

We do similar scans for every other major asset class in the World (Stocks, Rates, Commodities & Forex), so this is no different.

All we want to know is who the leaders are.

So here it is!

We've been talking a lot about crypto markets lately.

In fact, we just launched a new column exclusively for this emerging asset class.

As JC mentioned this morning, we've found quite the winning formula in selfishly pursuing projects and creating content that WE like. Fortunately, it usually turns out that our readers and clients think what we do is cool and valuable too.

Just like our new Saturday Morning Chartoons, everything we're doing with crypto lately is another great example of this self-serving strategy of ours.

Along those lines, we just created a custom index for cryptocurrency that we think is pretty damn neat. It also got us thinking about something...