Narratives of the week : October 29
We are back : $BTC is up +14% during a very bullish week
Welcome to this weekly recap, I am Viktor and you can find me here on Twitter and here on Telegram. Enjoy your reading !
$BTC and the market overall :
$BTC is once again up 2-digit gains this week, and people are now thinking that we are in the beginning of a bull market. $BTC currently trades around $34k, while it was still close to $29k a week ago. The fake news about an ETF approval by CoinTelegraph really made everyone realize that they were under-allocated to $BTC and that the ETF could come rather soon.
From October 19 to October 25, $BTC had 7 day green candles in a row, and it had one that was especially massive on October 23 : $BTC went from $30K to $34K in a day, and it even had one brutal candle that squeezed a lot of shorts from $32k to $35k in less than 5 minutes.
There is no exact explanation for the sudden move, but one of the catalysts was the fact that people saw that BlackRock ETF supposedly had a ticker $IBTC, that appeared on the DTCC website (don’t ask me what this is, all the crypto traders discovered the existence of the DTCC this week). Then the ticker was removed from the site… then it reappeared… then we were told that it has always been there ! Anyway, it looks like the market took this info as a sign that the ETF approval was imminent, and positioned accordingly.
BTC.D surged to 54% this week, and I expect it to remain very strong and go up in the next weeks leading to (hopefully!) the ETF approval. ETHBTC currently stands at 0.052, so it dumped again this week. Besides a mean reversal, or a potential mini alt season, there is no strong rationale for an ETH catchup in the weeks to come, as flows are logically going to BTC because the ETF is for… BTC.
The BTC pump was massive, so it would not shock me if we have a slight correction or chop for some time.
The altcoin narratives :
SOL : +8% over 7 days
$SOL performance has been impressive this week, as an already well-capitalized token, and with the risk of the FTX liquidators selling their $SOL tokens. A part of its move up has been due to shorts being squeezed. We can see on the Solana Explorer that Galaxy (in charge of selling FTX $SOL tokens) has indeed started to send some $SOL to CEX, and has probably sold them, but it did not affect its price too much. One of the bullish catalysts for $SOL is Solana Breakpoint in the first days of November, but after such an impressive week, and even as $SOL spot holder, I expect $SOL to underperform in the weeks to come. Here is a “short thesis” tweet by Nay :
Here is also a bearish thread by Jordi :
WLD (+14%) and the AI basket :
$WLD has been performing very well this week, it is in a slow but linear uptrend and is quite volatile around that trendline. I have stated during the recent weeks that I was short this coin, and while I was rather confident even a week ago, I am way less now. My short is underwater and my instinct tells me that $WLD will go up more, maybe to the $2-$2.5 range… and possibly even more ! PC explains here the rationale behind a $WLD long :
OpenAI hosts a conference (DevDay) on November 6 and this acts as a positive catalyst for the whole AI coin sector. Here are a few examples of these coins (AI related) and their performance over the last 7 days : $RNDR (+21%), $FET (+55%), $AGIX (+29%), $OCEAN (+27%), $AKT (+31%), $PHB (+26%). There are a few others if you also take into account the AI coins that are mainly on-chain, such as $TAO, which is now the main bag of Algod and I expect him to shill it hard in the coming weeks/months.
MINA : +52%
$MINA is almost the best performer in the top 100 coins, and this pump is news-driven… and fueled by the Koreans ! Upbit, the main Korean exchange, announced the listing of $MINA on its platform and it generated a sudden craze and significant brutal pump of +90%, that retraced halfway in the following days. $MINA was a winner of the Jan-Feb echo bubble, and it led the “ZK narrative”, along with $DUSK and $LRC, but it has been mostly forgotten by the market during the 8 next months.
LINK : +23%
$LINK has had a quite singular behaviour during the bear market because its 2022 May dump, it started to range between $6 and $8 and almost never got out of it, besides some deviations above and below. Now it has finally had a clear breakout of this range, which teleported it in 2 days from $8 to $10 and now above $11. It has been one of the strongest major this week, and could be in the category or “winners that keep winning”.
INJ : +52%
$INJ is probably the best example of winner that keeps winning. It is a top performer among top 100 coins this week, and has been strong during the whole 2023 year. It is impressive to see that it has had very limited drawdowns against BTC this year, and is now reaching territories very close to its ATH vs BTC from 2021.
Here’s what I wrote about it a few days ago :
RUNE : +44%
$RUNE has been going down only versus BTC since April 2022 but it suddenly started to bounce at the beginning of August, and it did almost a 3X before retracing -33% after they temporarily stopped Thorswap because of its use by FTX exploiter. Now that $BTC is trending up, $RUNE has strongly bounced too. It is still down close to 90% from its ATH, but the recent price action suggests that it is probably a bad idea to bet against it.
GALA : +34%
$GALA is up +34% this week, I don’t think there is much to say about it, besides the fact that this coin has not been mentioned that much on my Twitter timeline, and that is is up more than $SAND and $MANA (the 3 tend to move together as “metaverse basket”) after having underperformed them substantially in September.
APE : +22%
$APE has been one of the worst performers in 2023 among top 100 coins, but is finally showing some positive signs of life. It had bounced a few times close to the $1 Schelling point / support, and is now up +35% from it, with a positive catalyst : Apefest, on Nov 3-5.
APT (+24%) and SUI (+19%) :
$APT is one of the best-performers among large market caps this week, up +24%. We have already seen in January $APT have a huge hated rally, and it is not surprising that a low-float / high FDV token has a strong reversal to the upside when the market pumps. But it should be noted that around 25M $APT ($170M) are unlocked on November 12. That is a lot of selling pressure to absorb. In the same category, $SUI had a solid week too.
LDO : +9%
$LDO was one of the leaders of the January-February echo bubble, and is also a kind of levered beta on ETH. Despite ETH underperformance versus BTC, LDO performed on par with BTC on this recent move up.
DOT : +7%
$400M of $DOT tokens locked for parachain auctions have been released on October 24th. DOTBTC is in a linear downtrend since the beginning of September, but $DOT is still up 10% this week.
BTC betas did not move this week :
One noticeable and quite strange behaviour of the market this week is that even if BTC had a great green week, all of its most direct beta coins ($STX, $BCH, $BSV) underperformed significantly : +6% for $STX, +0.7% for $BCH, -10% for $BSV. I find it especially surprising for $STX.
DOGE : +13%
There was a lot of speculation about a DOGE pump, especially with the one-year anniversary of the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk, but it did not materialize, $DOGE ended up performing on par with $BTC. My opinion on DOGE :
CFX : +45%
$CFX was a winner of the echo bubble, the main leader of the “China narrative”, but it has been mostly forgotten by the market during several months, and it even underperformed every pump. But this time its price increased a lot, so it might be starting a revival arc ?
Memecoins and on-chain land
PEPE : +65%
The best-performer in the top 100 this week is $PEPE. The initial pump was initiated by the news that the PEPE team burned $6M worth of tokens (link to their announcement tweet). And then the pump continued. I already wrote in my article about positioning that I was holding spot $PEPE and that I expected it to outperform $DOGE and any main memecoin of the last cycle. So it’s not very surprising to see it reach the $500M market cap mark again, after having been forgotten for some time.
FLOKI : +52%
$FLOKI is another memecoin that is up substantially this week, and the reason for that is that they launched a staking feature for $FLOKI, where stakers are paid in a new token called TokenFi with ticker $TOKEN. Its current market cap is close to $60M.
The on-chain memecoins :
The market has been very hot this week on-chain. The $BTC pump and the hope that we are in the beginning of a new cycle has propelled a lot of memecoins :
$BITCOIN : +76%. $BITCOIN remains my highest conviction bet among memecoins, with $PEPE. I am glad to see it perform this well.
$JOE : +200%. It is a recent memecoin that has a huge mindshare and still trades at a relatively low market cap. The meme is fun and simple, does not have schizo vibes, I like it a lot.
$SPX : +10% this week. It went +50% and retraced most of the move.
real smurf cat : +520%. I heard it was based on a Tik Tok meme. This one giga-sent this week, I don’t exactly understand why but you should at least have it on your watchlist.
$UNIBOT is close to flat this week (current price is $58) while $BANANA formed a bottom at $5 and is back to $8. These tokens don’t seem to pump a lot even during this risk-on environment, so they probably offer a limited upside but in the same time a limited downside too. I expected them to be stronger as they should react positively to any surge in on-chain activity.
Some (mostly “shitcoin”) tickers I’ve seen a few times on Twitter this week : $MSTR, $HAY, $TOONS, $LMI, “DEV SMASHED HIS KEYBOARD”. Most of them will probably go to zero but if you like shitcoining, that list could be useful.
Some good tweets / threads :
High Stakes is long :
Crypto is going to outperform stocks from now on :
Memecoins are the new DeFi summer :
$BTC thoughts :
Time to be flat ?
New Arthur Hayes article :
How to find 10-100x coins :
Some coins to watch :
Trading advice :
Spot on outperformers :
Huma is flat :
Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.
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Yours is my must read every week, thanks man!