Bitcoin Trading in Tight Range With Lowest Volatility in Months

Bitcoin has been trading in an increasingly tight range, squeezed in a large triangle/wedge, between key EMAs, with bands tightening, with EMAs converging, resisting $6k over and over, and trading around mining costs. Meanwhile volatility is lowest its been in 15 months.

This sort of Bitcoin tightening pattern has gone on since June, and in fact, if we measure a market by the amount it drops or doesn’t over time, we could argue the stagnation, recent minor uptrend in Sept, and lack of lower lows since June actually means we aren’t in a bear market any more.

I’m not sure I would say this isn’t a bear market myself, but certainly it feels like market conditions have changed a bit since June for BTC and since early Sept for alts (many alts took bigs hit Aug – early Sept).

The main problem here is this: This tightening is a nice setup for the next bull run. And that is scary for bulls.

Why is that a problem? It is a problem because “a nice setup for the next bull run is exactly the sort of setup you would expect bears to pull out the big guns for.”

Crypto has a real chance to break one way or the other right now due to the general pattern being formed for 2018 (something at least one Forbes contributor agrees with).

I have no clue which way it’ll go, or if it’ll continue to trade in an ever tightening range sideways (that is essentially what happened in 2015, so the precedent is there). However, I will say that Doge and XRP give me hope, because we can see that those coins did actually break out of their bear trends (for now at least) and blow through a lot of resistance… after breaking a downtrend by going sideways in a tightening pattern with decreasing volatility before surging upward (as you can see in the XRP chart below).

The XRP bears did not stop XRP, perhaps the BTC bears will not stop BTC? Thing is, BTC is the head crypto, so the stakes are higher and, as noted above, that is the reason I worry that they will start bringing out the big guns.

Big guns = 100+ BTC sell walls and market orders instead of just 90+ BTC sell walls <—– joke; half-joking

Bottomline: BTC is trading in a tightening range. One would expect that to lead to the formation of a new pattern and for the mood of the market to shift accordingly. As someone who runs a crypto site I would hope the next phase is sideways or up and not a victory for bears and depression for HODLers… but like, crypto though. 2018 has been a bear, gotta be wary of bears in a market like that despite the minor recent uptrend.

XRP 2018 wedge with breakout.