In my years trading, I've never really seen the doomers win out.

So I'm going to go ahead and guess that they don't win out yet again.

High-timeframe plans

S&P is my second largest position in my long-term hold port, and I've been patiently waiting for an opportunity to buy.

The stance I'm taking right now is since I don't have any sort of concrete edge with reading this, I'm not going to try to predict.

If we trade down lower and we get some sort of puke type move, I'm going to use that to shove heavy and add to the long-term positioning.

If this is the bottom and we just start the classic S&P grind up again, then I'll just DCA on the way up.

Win either way.

The greedy part of me wants to see the puke come through.

The experienced part tells me that the likelihood of us playing out how everybody wants is not that likely.

Still have gold and a little silver. These are long-term plays, and I don't really expect them to be large performers. Inflation hedges or whatever you want to call it.

Bitcoin

Closed my hedge and went back to being net long for the first time in months.

I feel good about Bitcoin right now, but I don't have high conviction that the low is in.

The first half of Q2 is probably going to be bullish with some kind of reversion against the downtrend. Then we'll see where we go from there.

If we start to see acceptance over this core battle zone of 72 to 74k, I could see price slice through the low volume node quickly.

If we do get that equity puke instead, I'd be looking to buy BTC in the lower 60s, maybe the upper 50s.

A lot of these upward moves have been led by spot, which makes me more confident we're at the reaccumulation stage of the cycle.

TLDR; Accumulation meta. I'm expecting a higher low from here in the MTF and a springboard into the 80s. Derisking into the 80/90s makes sense.

Cheers.

What I look for when I think a bottom is forming.

It all starts with context

What is the market respecting?

The easiest way to make good game plans in markets is not to brute force whatever you like, but rather just ask the market, what are you respecting?

And then use that as a guide.

When I noticed the quarterly VWAP was clean over and over again, I used that to form my trade ideas.

When I laid the 12-hour trend on top of it, I saw it hold price from 95k all the way down to 60k.

Premium or discount

You're going to have the highest trade expectancy at pivots rather than no man's land.

Trade at price extremities.

Order books

Think of it like you're leading the charge on a battle line.

You'd be more confident with a million soldiers behind you versus ten, right?

The best pivots have come from very very thick books. You want your armies at your back.

Spot flow

Spot tends to lead the charge.

If spot is selling in a downtrend, you kind of don't want to fight that. Shorts were getting away with willy-nilly positioning as long as big brother spot was selling.

Down at the February lows, the first thing we saw was shorts closing their positions.

Once big brother spot takes their foot off the gas, people shorting are exposed. They don't have armies at their back and they don't have the firepower of spot selling.

Initiation and counterflows

People who were driving the sells now turn into net buys.

All of these things together are what you want to be looking at in pivots. These are your clues that a pivot is close.

I did a stream on this in the Paragon last week.

Traveling and visiting family, so check out my in-depth guide on building a trading tool with Claude code:

In mid-January we discussed buying the capitulation event into 60k weekly support, weeks before we ever even got there.

In February, we dabbled in speculating that a relief rally would occur due to Bitcoin's resilience amongst war events near the range lows.

Now, the best approach is to wait for definitive strength.

The 12H 200 MAs trend which implied weakness in the market 5 months ago creeps lower in an attempt to catch up to today's price action. Any reclaim of that trend plus a true breakout of the range would set up a larger rally.

In the meantime, as long as that doesn't happen, I'm not seeing the incentive to take countertrend bets with the way things have developed.

I believe patience will pay off, whether that means a more prominent risk-on signal, or the ability to buy substantially lower prices.