Scott Melker (4:05)

And he's gonna be drinking aquapana too.

Mike Alfred (4:07)

Yeah, Aquapona wagyu. I got, I just bought a bottle of Screaming Eagle for myself yesterday. Screaming Eagle and a bottle of Harlan Estate. Never had them before. Never had 100 acre either. I'm just, I'm just at the point in my life where I'm like, I gotta taste everything, dude.

Scott Melker (4:22)

I had a friend who was. Went on a golf trip with some billionaire buddy on his plane and they somehow got their hands on the Stanley cup on this trip and the guy poured like five bottles of Screaming Eagle into the Stanley cup and they were drinking Screaming Eagle from the Stanley Cup.

Mike Alfred (4:38)

That's exactly what I would do.

Scott Melker (4:40)

That's right. So we're looking at that's peak bull market by the way, guys, if you see that happening on on X, Screaming Eagle's very expensive wine. One of the most expensive actually. And if you see that happening, it's going to be a good time to sell. That might be our signal actually.

Mike Alfred (4:54)

Well, actually it's not that expensive. I mean I, I got a bottle for 2400 Christmas discount. So I mean look, it's, it's only a 2021. None of the like hardcore wine drinkers going to be impressed by that. But I don't care. I don't buy these wines to stick them on the shelf or like impress anyone. I buy them, I open them, I look at them objectively compared to the others and I say, you know, I still think insignia for the 2018 insignia for 250 is a pretty good value compared to Screaming Eagle for.

Scott Melker (5:22)

Isn't that what we were drinking in Vegas?

Mike Alfred (5:25)

Yeah, we had the 20, I think we had the 2018 or 2019 insignia. Thank you again for that. Scaramucci sent me a whole case that.

Scott Melker (5:33)

Might have been a top signal that I was paying for the insignia and Wagyu that night.

Mike Alfred (5:37)

No, I don't think so. I think that's a, that's a mid cycle thing when things are going to get a lot crazy. I think people haven't been around one of these bull markets before. They're just not aware that nothing we've experienced up till now is very interesting from a, from a bitcoin cycle perspective. Like if you look back historically, like the moves are much more significant on a percentage basis than what we've seen so far. And you need the vast majority of the general public to be interested. Again, no interest. There are some people that are dcaing into bitcoin, right. There are some grandmas and grandpas who bought the ETF recently. But the, but the euphoria that you typically see before any sort of top is nowhere to be found. And that gives me a lot of confidence that we are going higher. I mean calling for 180 or 200k right now is quite easy. Yeah, it was much harder to do that a year ago, a year and a half ago when we were talking about those types of numbers. But this is what always happens, right? You start to move up and then all of a sudden people can imagine higher prices. And then the kind of influencers who don't really have any guts or aren't really that brave, they show up now saying, oh, 150, 200k is coming. It's like, how is that a call?

Scott Melker (6:42)

Of course, 50% up in a bull market for bitcoin is not so bold.

Mike Alfred (6:46)

We're going to that level. Right. This is the having year. This is the year before the big year. The way I think of it is 2025 is the crux year. Everything up until now is just positioning for 2025. And a large part, you can see most of the cycle returns in a few months during that crux year. That's where we're at. So I'm watching January, February, March quite closely. I think the end of this year has been disappointing for, for people who know these cycles pretty well. But that doesn't really mean anything because the cycle could start one day and two weeks later we could be up 30, 40, 50% easy. Yeah, yeah. I think it's just a time for people to sit on their hands and either add to positions or stay put. But nothing's really happened yet from my perspective.

Scott Melker (7:31)

Yeah, I agree. I think this is just the ramp up. Well, you talked about people dollar cost averaging into bitcoin. We just got to quickly give our praise to this guy. Microstrategy buys over 5,000 again this week. So 561 million actually a small purchase for him of late. They were all over a billion, mostly over 2 billion I think for the last five weeks. But clearly Michael Saylor is not afraid to continue dollar cost averaging at any price. And these were at like 106,000 a coin. So as he says, he'll be buying the top forever.

Mike Alfred (8:01)

Yep, yep, he sure is. And he is a genius. I, I called him a couple years ago. One of the best.

Scott Melker (8:10)

I met you at his house.

Mike Alfred (8:11)

Yeah, yeah. But I, I called him a couple times before this run. Probably gonna end up being one of the best investors of all time in, in history. And that was kind of an unpopular call because the Wall Street Journal was like saying his career was over a couple years ago. But you have to be early and you have to be non consensus, you have to be right. I think, you know, what he's doing is obviously really good for the ecosystem. I think everybody wins if, if the, if Wall street will keep providing this much capital, and I think they will for a while, then, you know, that's good for everybody. I just worry at the back end of the cycle. I see people getting more and more and more excited about the equity as the price goes up, which is the exact opposite of what you want to do as a long term investor. Right. Like I was really excited about micro strategy at the bottom and last year when it was like underperforming for most of the year in 2023, that's when I really liked it. And by the time I was up 16x from last spring, that's when I started to become a little bit more concerned and started talking about trimming it. And I trimmed obviously too early in retrospect, all the way from 195 up to 535 pre market on the the week before Thanksgiving. And those were the last three, four, five trims were really good trips. Now I still think it's going higher. I think MicroStrategy is going to 700, maybe a thousand plus this cycle. But at some point as people get more and more excited, the returns in the future actually get more compressed in spite of what the kid analysts are saying on Twitter that like it's going to go up forever. It's infinite money glitch. Like there is a point where that stock will start to underperform simply because there's just so much exuberance in it. And it's all predicated on the price of bitcoin continuing to go up. As you know, at some point the price will stop going up and go down as happens every cycle. And people who pile into some of these things near the peak won't do as well as those of us who were excited at the bottom. It's easy to say now, but I was on your show talking about MicroStrategy, Coinbase, miners, et cetera. Actually, at the bottom you can go back and look at the archives. So I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. I'm not going to get carried away and go, oh, let me pile into these things as they go up. No, the time to have done that was a couple years ago.

Scott Melker (10:26)

We're going to jump into the other stocks and how they've performed. I just have one comment here I need to bring up. I still think it's going higher, but I'm trimming my position. Somebody laughing at that comment. Dude, if you're just trying to time everything at the dead top, you are going to lose absolutely everything. Just telling the person in the comments, Mike is completely right. You always rebalance, you always take profit on the way up, you never intend to sell the top. You should be taking a piece off every time you see these massive moves to the upside because the risk adjusted upside becomes less the higher it goes. So what Mike's describing exactly how every professional investor and trader would approach A position. You see people freaking out when Cathie Wood sells Coinbase, she still wants Coinbase to go up more because she still owns huge positions in that stock and others. You're rebalancing to make sure you're not too overweight and too, and having too much risk. So just throwing that out there.

Mike Alfred (11:26)

Yeah, that's, that's right. I'd look at a professional's orientation around this market is going to be different than, you know, a hobbyist or an amateur. And that's fine, right. In some, some parts, the hobbyists and amateurs have beaten the professionals at investing in Bitcoin itself. Because the thing you want to do with spot bitcoin, you know, in cold storage, is hold it for 10 years. That's worked really well. But equities are a different, different beast. And of course, if you're managing some part somebody else's money, you have different considerations. So look, I, I don't blame anyone for wanting to get more excited as we go up. That's human nature. I just caution people, as this cycle progresses, things are going to get crazier and crazier and crazier and you have to at least try to protect your principal on the downside, if you can. So anyway, for what it's worth, right?

Scott Melker (12:18)

Yeah. If you sell 20% of a position to take some profit, if you're an emotional dummy, you're now hoping it goes down so that you sold the top. But if you're a smart investor, you want the other 80% to continue up. But people really struggle with that. I think you were a thing before the peak top.

Mike Alfred (12:35)

I think your position should always be whatever keeps you most balanced. Right. So if you sell too much, such that you're worried that it's going to go up higher than you sold too much. Right. If you're worried it's going to go lower because your position is too heavy.

Dan Chart Guys (12:48)

Right.

Mike Alfred (12:48)

And it's bigger than you're comfortable with and you need to trim it down. You should always be effectively at a neutral state. And you know, the more skilled you are at it and the better you get at it, the more you can maintain this overweight state through the bottom of the cycle, all the way going up near the top, because you can sort of stay emotionally balanced even though most people would be whip side out of positions. Right. So like, I don't recommend people have positions that are as concentrated as what I've maintained off the bottom of the cycle, but I've worked really hard for 25 years to find that balance through running right through my own form of meditation, et cetera. Right. Like finding ways to keep that balance the whole way. But if you ever find yourself feeling like you want things to go down, it's because you sold too much. Right. And so I, I trimmed for me, whatever it was 60 of my microstrategy position off the bottom. Like my last trim I did at a 16x16 17x off the bottom for me. Right. So that's my actual lived return. That was more than enough. I haven't worried at all about it going down or up since because I trimmed exactly the right amount for my situation and I didn't roll it into other bitcoin related stuff. Most of the money I trimmed from MicroStrategy went into tobacco stocks, alcohol stocks, healthcare stocks. Like stuff that probably goes up in 2026 when crypto's going down.

Scott Melker (14:07)

Tobacco and alcohol stocks with the healthcare stocks.

Mike Alfred (14:09)

Yeah, yeah, I know it's ironic, but my only job as an investor is to make high risk adjusted returns. It's not, it's not to like convince anyone that all these values are consistent or even that there's values being expressed at all. I don't smoke cigarettes. I hate cigarettes. And I made a killing in Altria and Philip Morris. And I think you'll continue to do well on those stocks, especially if we get another downturn, which I do think is coming in the next 24 months. There's going to be some sort of a liquidity downturn. It's going to take down the same stocks that went down in 2022 and 2018. And if you're all in 100% all in on levered crypto exposure, you're going to be down 80, 90% again. And just at this stage of my career, just not interested in that anymore.

Scott Melker (14:51)

It's called a net zero portfolio. You're an effective hedge fund by having healthcare stocks alongside the tobacco, tobacco and the alcohol. But I do want to go back to crypto stocks, obviously. The block ran this article yesterday. The best and worst performing Crypto Stocks of 2024, MicroStrategy, Core Scientific lead the way. I mean, you've been on top of every single one of these on this show, which is why I bring it up. Core Scientific obviously came out of bankruptcy. Right. So I think that that had some extra upside there because people thought it might be going to zero. But you can see the ones that kind of did the best. And it's interesting to see this sort of differentiation between the winners and the losers, I guess. Even specifically in. In miners. Right, because there's some that clearly outperformed massively to the upside. I mean, you got like kaded down, down 5%, right. And, you know, kind of iris and. And show.

Mike Alfred (15:41)

Show me the worst. Show me the worst ones, because Bit Farms is down 40%. Marathon's down, whatever it is, 10, 12%. Riots down 20%. There they are.

Scott Melker (15:50)

There they are.

Mike Alfred (15:51)

Yeah, look, i32th this year was really a story of a reversal of what happened last year. Like, if you look closely at the 2023 returns, the miners crushed Micro Strategy and Coinbase. And actually there were points in the year where they were up, like, some of them were up 600, 700% when micro strategy and Coinbase were up less than 100% for periods of time, or 100 to 100 to 150%. This year there's been a reversal of that where, with a few exceptions, and by the way, Core Scientific was going through a bankruptcy in 2023. So, like, this is what happens in markets. Everybody turns negative on one idea at the end of the cycle and then they flip up their little micro cycles within the major bitcoin cycle. I think we're going to have another one of those in 2025 where, like, you just could flip that list over again and you'll see some of the laggards become the leaders again. This is just the cycles of life and markets. So I don't read too much into it. I look at the full cycle returns and the clear winner is MicroStrategy off the bottom, like they're crushing the best. Like the best miners like Cipher and Iron and Terra Wolf off the bottom, they're. They're half the return of MicroStrategy. Right? So, like, if. If you were just judging from the absolute bottom, till today, you've wanted to be in Microstrategy. I'm not sure by the end of next year whether that'll still be the case or not, but either way, as long as you own all of them, you've done fine. I think the distraction is to get, like, looking at any shorter period than that and saying, okay, over the last month or last six months or even year to date, which again, is another arbitrary period, totally, who did better? So, look, I still think 2025 is the key year. If 2025 ends up being the key year where we have exceptional returns in some of those names, you may see some reordering of that static ranking for the full cycle again. And that's actually what I'm expecting I am expecting some movement in that. I think the, the microstrategy outperformance could continue for a while, but I think by the end of the cycle, especially from the higher and higher levels, like if you bought at 535 in MicroStrategy, you're probably going to lose to Bitcoin and miners for the rest of the cycle. If you bought MicroStrategy in Q1 or Q2 of last year, you're probably going to beat everything. So some of it is a function. You know, they show these returns on the screen, but some of it is a function is your actual experience as an investor. Where did you buy? Did you FOMO into something that had already run a lot? Did you wait until there was sentiment was really compressed? I think right now stuff like Iron and Cipher still looks really good to me because not only are their economics improving every month, they hit all their forecasts, by the way.

Scott Melker (18:25)

Iron hit and they're mining at like 29,000 a coin. I listen to a bit of the call.

Mike Alfred (18:30)

Iron. Iron's at 15 joules per terahash, right? The most efficient large fleet in the, in the industry. 31xHash going to 50 with Bitcoin at 95k. Like, look, you don't have to be a genius. That's going to be a really, really profitable business in 2025. And you'll start to see those earnings flow through separate from the fact that everybody's monetizing their AI exposure right now. And I think Iron in particular has like one of the best sites in the world to be monetized. And I think Cypher has a number of good sites that have power available immediately. And we've seen some of the larger deals that the hyperscalers are trying to do with other utilities getting blocked. We know the nuclear stuff is going to take four or five, six years if it ever really takes off. So I think 2025 is a, is a key year and you want to go into a year like 2025 with negative sentiment. If you go into 2025 with too much exuberance again, the returns will be compressed. And I think that's actually what micro. MicroStrategy's biggest challenge is right now is just there's so much excitement about the name in the meantime. By the way, the stock has sort of topped out temporarily, right? It like had that one exuberant day where I had the big red candle.

Scott Melker (19:36)

It was in the 500s and the 300s in the same day.

Mike Alfred (19:38)

Yeah, 535 back to 370 I was. I was actually driving back from somewhere and I put in a pre market order and I was watching it like every time I stop I'd look. I said holy crap this thing is really reversing and we're still sitting below those levels. And bitcoin hasn't really done anything. So that is what happens right. Like when you have something trading at such. Such a kind of premium driven off of exuberance. And so I think you see the reverse thing in some of the leading miners where iron Nothing is wrong with the company from my perspective. They're executing exactly on their plan but there's always a lag between that execution and when the market gives you full credit. So I think that's what's coming in 25i. I lose zero sleep over this stuff. Right. Like I. I've been around long enough to know that anything that looks like dramatic outperformance and very short term usually reverts to the mean and anything that looks like dramatic underperformance usually reverts to the mean. And so I think we'll see that kind of yo yo this year and I think we'll see signs of it in. In the next month or two. Like I. I think it's basically prime time now. So like if you don't see some movement in the miners with Bitcoin at 120 or 150k then now I got to start to reexamine my original position but I'm not worried about that because I'm pretty confident that's where things are headed.

Scott Melker (20:56)

What do you make of Marathon Riot Core Scientific the miners that are following the microstrategy path with the convertible notes to be Sailor we're not seeing other companies do that but now we've seen a number of miners try to do it while they're also actively mining bitcoin. So another way for them to gain more bitcoin.

Mike Alfred (21:16)

There is a bright line between people who are using the convertible note structure to get capital to expand their mining business and their infrastructure and people who are using that capital to buy bitcoin. And when you look at that divergence there like the people who are not using the capital to buy bitcoin have very good efficient mining operations and are hitting their forecast. So like if you look at the most recent ones to do it you know Iron if you look at clean spark right. If you look at Terra Wolf like they're all hitting their targets so they're not tempted to just buy bitcoin which is to me, like a bit of a diversionary tactic, because if you actually have one competitive advantage as a miner in late cycle, it's that you can produce the bitcoin at cost while everyone else has to buy it at market. So why would you take that advantage if you have it, why would you take that and give it up to be just like the companies who had the advantage earlier in the cycle because they didn't have the headwinds of dilution coming from like expanding their mining operation or buying machines or the having or any of these things. So I look at it a little bit more skeptically, like I'm happy that people are doing that because paradoxical gets really good for the good operators. But I think as you go into this late cycle, mid to late cycle dynamic, you actually want to own the infrastructure and generate the Bitcoin at 30k. You don't want to buy it at 100 or 150k, even if the market's essentially giving you what looks like free capital. By the way, the capital is never free. People who used the structure last cycle and weren't able to pay the notes down like they went bankrupt, of course scientific is a good example. So you can't just stack debt forever, right? And not everybody has the same scale as microstrategy. So like a lot of people will.

Scott Melker (22:55)

Follow them or the same appetite or there's just not that much appetite for the notes. There's a different appetite for a microstrategy convertible note that than there is for that core scientific.

Mike Alfred (23:05)

And even that demand will turn over if the liquidity cycle turns over, which all tends to happen at the same time that bitcoin goes down. So it'll just be, it'll. Everything will look like it's frictionless and it'll just work. It'll work, it'll work and then all of a sudden one day it won't. And at some point between that day and and the like the absolute bottom of the next cycle, like you'll be down 90% and almost all the stuff question is 90% from what level? And my suspicion is at some point this year you'll be up so much that it'll be hard to imagine losing money, right? And of course like if you're up enough, you could lose 90 and still be up. But I think a lot of people are going to do the opposite. They're gonna not be in now, right, because they've been scared by the macro prognosticators for the last two years and they're afraid that Bitcoin's already topped out. So they're not going to be in. They're not going to be in and then they're going to get in because they just can't stand the FOMO anymore at 150 or 200k Bitcoin. And that's actually the point of highest risk because those people are coming in without the embedded returns of those of us who've been in the last two years or longer. And then they write it all the way down 90. And those are the people who complain and those are the people the Wall Street Journal writes the articles about. Has nothing to do with what I'm doing as a professional. I just kind of trade around that, right. Like when I see those articles, like I think I told you this recently, like JP Morgan, there's an article, JP Morgan says the mining business is terrible. Well, that was a, that was a short term low, right? Like the, literally that the article came out. If you bought the miners, then you doubled your money and a bunch of them or more. That was like September time frame, right? So like that was a great time to, to buy them. The next time I see an article saying miners are the best business in the world, that'll be a good time to trim them. So you just gotta watch for those things and you kind of fade that sentiment. It's usually a pretty good, you know, indicator of where we are.

Scott Melker (24:48)

Yeah. And we were talking about sort of volumes increasing even though price is only at 95,000. We have some obviously anecdotal evidence here that there's an insane demand right now for bitcoin. We have a 14 billion option expiry tomorrow. This is the biggest in deribit history. 4 billion of those are in the money. And then crypto OTC destate trading volumes are going gangbusters right now. So even what you're not seeing on exchange right now behind the curtain and obviously with options, we're really seeing the highest volumes we've ever seen.

Mike Alfred (25:19)

And that makes sense why bitcoin's kind of lagging here, right? Because if it is true that a lot of the market makers might be exposed, given how much price movement there's been last couple months, you might see bitcoin kind of bounce around these levels, maybe a little lower, a little higher until tomorrow and then it could rip over the weekend and start a second. I just think we're days away. The, the one tweet that I posted recently that I actually like feel pretty strongly is that we are days, if not just a couple Weeks away from the beginning of the next major move that'll take us from kind of the 90, 95k level to like 120, 130 and. And we could literally just be waiting for this options expiration. We see open interest ticking up even as the price turned down. I think a lot of smart people understand that, like were at the part of the cycle where your odds of success are so high that it just doesn't make sense to be short. It's. We're probably not going to hit 120 or 130 by New Year's Eve, but if we're back at 105, if we're at 105 or 110, then we'll hit it in January. Right. And that's close enough for government work. The key here is nobody needs to get this stuff exactly right. Like, if you want to do it like I do for entertainment value, fine. But like, the goal is not to get it exactly right. The goal is to get it approximately right and directionally right over long periods of time and, and do it in enough size to matter. And again, like, if you've just been long bitcoin from the bottom and you stayed long and ignored all the hype and the, the FOMO and the, the negative sentiment and the news flow and all that stuff, like, you've done really well. Right. You're up. You're up 5 over 5x6x ish. Approximately. Right. So that's pretty good for an asset that you just had to hold for two years.

Scott Melker (27:04)

Yeah. So I know we're supposed to be going right now, but I'm going to bother you for a couple more minutes, hopefully. What do you place the odds of the strategic Bitcoin reserve at happening? I mean, how do you handicap that? And are there any other sort of white swan catalysts like that you could see that could really be the thing that kind of doubles triples bitcoin in a matter of a month.

Mike Alfred (27:26)

I don't know if there needs. Look, I think the SBR probably happens under Trump. It seems like he's, he's committed to it. It seems like such an easy thing to do.

Scott Melker (27:34)

Right.

Mike Alfred (27:35)

It doesn't actually, from my view, require that much of a lift. You don't have to buy a ton in the open market. You can just take what we already have and add to it steadily over time. He, he hasn't put into place anyone into key positions in the new government that would be against doing that. And I think he's very sensitive to market prices. I Think he realizes now that equities are important, but so is bitcoin. And he's probably going to use bitcoin as a barometer of the success of his presidency. And so he'll be wanting to do things to drive it. I'm not sure it matters. I think bitcoin's programmed to go higher and we may find articles later in the cycle that go, oh, that makes so much sense. If we had known that was going to happen, we would have known for sure we're going to 200, 250K. But I think it's foolish to think that those things are predictable. I think it's more important to just have a general sense of where it's headed. So, yeah, I do think it's happening, but I don't think that necessarily even by itself is going to be the reason why it goes up. Like, I, I agree.

Scott Melker (28:35)

I just think it could be, you know, listen, there could be the difference between, hey, our normal cycle top is 2,250and all of a sudden it's 5 or 600 because something crazy happens.

Mike Alfred (28:44)

Yeah, yeah, no, Look, I think 500 is possible. I think 315 is still a good target. I think 200, 150 to 200 is most likely. But again, all those things, if we talk in three months and we're at 200 and the SBR hasn't even been put in place yet, then, you know, you got to start looking at higher targets. You know, on the mining side, the core weave ipo, like I don't think there's going to be any top in miners until at least then. So if that isn't until April, May time frame, you're going to have a whole Wall street like they, it's, it's seasonal, right? They, they kick up a lot of dust in the spring and then they kick up a lot of dust in the fall and things go quiet over the winter, you know, over the holidays and over the summertime, right? Kids are out of school, like you're doing stuff with family and so things are going to really get hot again. January, February, March. It's just the cycles of life. And the question is just like, where is bitcoin going that window? What announcements happen in the mining ecosystem? How much appetite is there for the microstrategy convertibles? How many more nation states decide to do something with bitcoin? How many other corporates that are non bitcoin related decide to follow Saylor, Right? How does the FASB rule changes actually affect earnings? Right? Like you're going to see substantial earnings from a number of companies that hold bitcoin that of course, those of us who are paying attention know are coming. But the, the market is going to be shocked by that because it's like, holy shit, how is this company generating so much earnings? And a lot of it's. Yeah, it's an accounting change more than anything real in the business. But keep in mind it's a reversal of many years where all you got holding bitcoin was the markdowns and not the markup. So, like, it is fair that now people are going to report these higher earnings because for years they had to report lower earnings when bitcoin went down. So look, there's a lot of things like this. It's hard to handicap exactly how that plays out, but I think the best bet is bitcoin higher and in particular bitcoin higher in the next one, two, three months. I think if we do this show in exactly three months from now, like we could go back and replay this clip. If, if we're at 100k or lower in 3 months, I will be concerned.

Scott Melker (30:54)

Just what are you doing on March 26th?

Mike Alfred (30:56)

I'm available, but listen, there was a time, I think on your show where I said if we're still at 30, 40, 50K, like September, October, November of this year, I'd be concerned. And of course we were at 60 something heading to 100. And so it's very, very quickly these undervaluations get corrected. I think you'll see that in the next three months. And if you don't again, I'll come on the show. I'll be the first to say, look, I thought we'd be higher than 100k in March, but I just don't think that's going to be the issue. I think the issue is going to be we've gone up so much that we're trying to figure out whether we're having a short term exuberance and that we need to be more cautious or whether we have a lot more to run. I think that's what we're going to be talking about in three, four months.

Scott Melker (31:37)

Totally agree, Mike. Any final parting thoughts? And where can people follow you? The secret is it's Mike Alfred.

Mike Alfred (31:43)

Yeah, just, just stay long. Bitcoin, I think even Ethereum could start to perform well over the next quarter or two. I think MicroStrategy, Coinbase, the miners, they all do well. I do think the best miners have a lot more upside from the current level. But I think as I said from the bottom of the cycle. You just want to hold as much of these things as you can, as much size as you can. That that's the best way to win here. And then be watchful for exuberance. We will see a top at some point, but it won't happen until like most people, you know, are interested in what we're talking about and they're just not interested right now. So.

Scott Melker (32:17)

Yeah, totally agree. Thank you, Mike, as always. I'm marking March 26th. Misha in the background there, mark my March 26th. It might even be a Sunday. I don't know. We're gonna come back in three months.

Mike Alfred (32:28)

Happy New Year.

Scott Melker (32:29)

Happy New Year, man. Thanks again. Always a pleasure. All right, guys, 180,000 march or the quant is fired. We're gonna bring on my other quant here. Chart, guys. Quant. What's your quant saying? My quant? He's not responding. It's the holidays.

Dan Chart Guys (32:48)

No, I've got no quant. But it would be nice to have someone else to point to, especially when things go wrong.

Scott Melker (32:56)

Yeah, of course. All right, so what are you looking at here?

Dan Chart Guys (32:59)

We've got two nice and clear levels in the short term. This is the four hour chart. Clearly we're struggling. Just under a hundred thousand. Not surprising. Nice round psychological number. And of course that base down at 92, 000. And just knowing where we are, you know, holiday week heading into the weekend, it would be entirely possible that we just bounce around within this sideways range through next weekend. As we talked about on the show last week, you know, the weekly consolidation, at this point there's no red flags. We can either even see a break of 92 and you know, the upper 80s. If they hold, that's still just fine for me. It's always that EMA 12 on consolidation. If that holds, then the retracement. There are no red flags. Oftentimes, you know, I like to see a break of a key level that, you know, there's a bunch of stops centered around, you know, flush those stops and then if you bounce right back up into that range, you know that there's an ample amount of demand still buying those dips. So that's something to be keeping an eye out as well. But nice clear sideways range.

Scott Melker (33:59)

Yeah. What do you think it means for altcoins? They've been suffering pretty bad here in the last not so long, but I guess the last two to three weeks we kind of had a bottom on dominance and then it pumped back up again.

Dan Chart Guys (34:12)

Yeah, it's still gotta, I mean, the dominance has to confirm this longer term downtrend for us to see that, that altcoin rotation. You know, there's some that are still holding on just fine. Like xrp, this is, you know, it has a base similar to bitcoin. Its base is just under $2. It's weekly consolidation. Considering where we just came from, it's fine as well. But more of the altcoins, you know, the retracement is definitely more than the bulls want to see in terms of, you know, 50% plus of the move that they saw up. They've given back. And so again, it's just, you know, and that's a lot of what to do with the sentiment in the crypto space. Just, you know, I have so many friends that are in town that aren't, you know, market friends, but they are in the market and their focus is all altcoins due to the, you know, the risk reward potential of, you know, more bang for my buck. If I want to make money, I want these altcoins. And you know, they're not loving what's been going on over the last three, four weeks during this period of consolidation because they've seen half of their gains over the last couple of months given back. So that's a large part to do with the sentiment that we're seeing.

Scott Melker (35:19)

Yeah. So what do you, what else do you look at? I mean, this is such a weird time of year, obviously kind of here between the holidays, but anything on your, on your radar?

Dan Chart Guys (35:28)

I mean, we had that NASDAQ sucker punch which again it's just over leveraged longs, you flush them out and in the V shaped bounce that's been happening for two years at this point in the broader market. So it's nice to see that response. And you know, for me that's, this looks like a sucker punch and then I'm getting confirmation saying okay, no big deal. I mean this is just, you know, how we go up in strong bull markets. You get those periods that flush people out. So good to see that there's no, you know, lingering fear in the broader market. We're back up looking at all time highs. Same thing. You know, we might chop around here sideways into the start of the new year, but we have a new line in the sand and that's that fear low from just a few days ago. And the simple statement is if that's holding, there's nothing to worry about. I am watching the crypto stocks, you know, MSTR also testing its EMA12 coin is testing its EMA12 on the weekly. I'm watching COIN here battle this previous resistance level where we topped out a bunch and then we hold it as support. We're trying to hold it as support. So pretty important zone in the 270s there. But again, they look like altcoins in the sense that they got their leg up, they're pulling back, they're looking for the weekly higher low. Some names are tracing more than others. Again, to your. To the point of the miners underperforming. That has been glaring. And I'm constantly watching, you know, I'm not. I'm not buying them now and assuming that relative strength is going to return, but I am watching for it. You know, is there going to be rotation back? Because again, they just been chopping around and doing a whole lot of nothing for six to eight months at this point, many of them. And, you know, I'd much rather as a bull, be focusing on COIN and mstr. But again, it's not giving up. It's like, is it time? I'm watching. And again, the same way that we do, you know, altcoin divided by Bitcoin to see relative strength and weakness. You know, I keep an eye on Mara divided by MSTR to just see, you know, yeah, it's still significantly underperforming and, you know, that has to change if I'm going to have any interest.

Scott Melker (37:24)

That's interesting. So you're sort of viewing MSTR as the bitcoin versus altcoins and everything else needs to outperform microstrategy or why even bother? I mean, that's kind of what Mike was alluding to as well, you know.

Dan Chart Guys (37:36)

Yeah, it changes. What I use is the barometer. You know, sometimes I'll look at the strongest miner in the group and then compare everything to that. But clearly MSTR is the. The crypto stock this cycle at this point. And so that's the leader that I compare things to just in terms of, you know, is their rotation out of MSTR into other places. And we saw some of it, you know, COIN divided by MSTR saw a nice bounce once MSTR had that blow off top. But, you know, it's not sustaining at this point. So just watching where the money is rotating to, and at this point there's nothing glaringly clear as far as that rotation among crypto stocks.

Scott Melker (38:14)

So what else are you watching as you step out of sort of crypto? Obviously you show the nasdaq, which is still doing better than crypto right now. So for all the Correlated people. I saw a lot of green on that NASDAQ chart that I wasn't seeing on crypto charts.

Dan Chart Guys (38:27)

Yeah, it the gme. I started watching GME to the few days ago for the first time in a while just because, you know, when you look at thousands of charts you have a backlog of a library. And I made some nice profits on Tesla's four hour ascending triangle where, you know, it's, it started breakout mode. We have a horizontal resistance level and then just higher lows getting tighter and tighter. And that broke bull to the all time high run that we just saw. And so I pulled up GME just randomly and was like, hey, this is the same pattern. There's a clear horizontal resistance. We're seeing these little higher lows. You know, it's a weekly bull flag which now has confirmed today. And just knowing that, you know, Roaring kitty knows enough about charts, it's like if I'm going to put out a tweet, I'm putting it out in this tight pattern that's testing resistance. And so we see a tweet of a presence yesterday which leads to a gap up open and a breakover resistance. And nice to see that play out. But just a lack of resistance nearby on GME. Once you clear 33.70, there's really nothing nearby. And so just getting my attention again for volatility, for trading. It's always fun to watch on Twitter. It's like a picture of a present on Christmas and people just dive down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out, you know, what's he mean or what, what secret codes are in here. For me it's, it's just, you know, a fun, a fun game playing the flashing numbers and they're going up right now, although pulling back as we speak. So let's see if bulls really want to hold the back test to that resistance zone as support.

Scott Melker (40:01)

Absolutely. But yeah, that's all you got up there.

Dan Chart Guys (40:04)

Yeah, we're in wait and see mode for bitcoin again sideways. If we break 92, just don't stay below it too long would be my request of the bulls buy that dip to keep that weekly chart nice and healthy. And then, yes, we'll be looking for that weekly higher low and to move back towards those recent highs in early 2025.

Scott Melker (40:24)

Perfect. Well, thank you as always, man. Really, really appreciate it. Hope you have a wonderful new year and I hope that the market also continues to have a wonderful new year in through 2025. Guys, you can follow Dan Chart, guys. Of course YouTube X everywhere he's at. Dan, I'll let you go. I got one more thing I need to talk about. All right, have a great one.

Dan Chart Guys (40:45)

See ya.

Scott Melker (40:46)

All right, guys, since we usually talk about Aptos on Wednesdays, it was Christmas. We're here, it's Thursday. You can see it up in the corner right there. The big news obviously in the last couple weeks with Aptos, for those who weren't tracking, is that my dear friend Moshe stepped down as CEO, still on the board. And Avery Ching, who was basically running the. Running it with him, has stepped up as the head of Aptos. Very big news. Listen, it makes absolutely no difference for Aptos. I just loved having the excuse to talk to Mo all the time. So it makes me a little sad in that regard. But I'm sure he has amazing things yet to come. You guys obviously know you can check out Aptos, AptosFoundation.org but just to show you, as that was happening and people were concerned about it, well, it hasn't really mattered from a development perspective. This was the week December 16th, 22nd, but we haven't talked since then. Aptos had 1.599 million new users in that one week period. Now have an impressive 40 million. Basically they've gone absolutely parabolic as the market has started to ramp up. I really think that this is going to be one of the winners that sees real adoption. Obviously choose very carefully and have been working with them for many months before for sort of bringing them on as an official sponsor. Really excited to see what they are building, see what they have coming for us. Excited to see what Mo does after this. I can't wait to find out what that's going to be, but did sort of cause a little bit of fud, which I just think is hilarious. Like as if the blockchain somehow changes or the adoption somehow changes because different people are running it. All right, guys, that's all I got for you. I'll be back tomorrow, I think with the Friday 5 and then off probably all of next week we'll be skiing. So that's all I got for you today. I will see you all tomorrow. Peace out.

Mike Alfred (42:38)

Let's dope.