 All right, folks, Big Cheds is a professional trader and one of the founding analysts of Bitcoin Live and educational platform for crypto. He also has a background in psychology, which he uses to help people deal better with FOMO and other emotional decisions in trading. Ched was also an amateur pro poker player and says that experience of risk management helps him in trading. He aims to empower people to be the best traders that they can possibly be. Big Cheds, thank you for joining us today. We are super, super excited to chat with you. How's it going? I appreciate it. I enjoyed the conversation, gentlemen. I was listening backstage and I enjoyed hearing your perspectives and I'm happy to be here today. So thank you. We are definitely curious to get some of your insights and look at some charts and kind of walk through a lot of what you're seeing in the market right now. So I guess we'll start with just like Bitcoin in general. What, in your opinion, has happened over the last week? And if you wouldn't mind pulling up a chart and feeling like kind of walk through what you're seeing right now. Yeah, sure. I have my screen up if you just want to pop it up. We can definitely do that. So Bitcoin's clearly been accelerating and we had that over the weekly time frame. We had that equilibrium pattern when we set our high, 64K. We set our low in this 80-day rectangle. And then we set that big lower high. And now it's the level to watch, right, 52K. So we set the lower high and then we set our higher low. Weekly time frame, MA50, the orange line, the simple moving average. Weekly chart never broke down. Even while the daily chart itself broke down a little bit below the MA200, we had a little bit of chop here. And even for a time, we lost that key horizontal, the January highs, and the February low. Really want to flip that resistance and turn it into support. So we kind of lost it here with that chop in September. But that's the thing. You get that noise on lower time frames. Weekly chart never really let up, right? Weekly chart really had that strength. And if you weren't in Bitcoin, you were waiting for a ghost signal. You had one on that lower high break at 52K. You could have entered there, set your risk at that level. That was your thesis. And after we hit that, you were watching this all-time high test, 64K. A lot of people have been asking me, and I'm on Twitter at Big Cheds, people have been asking me, what's up with altcoins, right? Is it time to play altcoins? And when the money's going into the king or going into Bitcoin, that's not the right time to play altcoins. But when Bitcoin pauses and consolidates, you see the money flow out. You see it usually first flow into Ethereum. And we can talk about that. We just had that beautiful all-time high test on Ethereum, and it flows into other altcoins. Hopefully you're playing ones with relative strength, ones that had been stronger before that consolidation, like Sol, like Luna, like some of these other things. And what was interesting, we had that ETF. And the other two guests probably know a little bit more about the fundamentals than I do. I just study price action. It all flows into the price action for me. I was expecting some type of a blow-off move with that all-time high. We didn't get it, actually. We had a nice kind of controlled rise. And if we go a little more granular here on the daily chart, you can notice the green lines, an exponential moving average, exponential means it gives more price weighting to the most recent candle. And you can see as it's been rising here, it's been using that eight EMA as support. And actually, even with today's volatility, where it dropped down to 62K, and right off that eight EMA. So it's having actually a nice controlled rise, making that new all-time high above 64K. But what I noticed last night, I noticed that some of the other alt started to run, and especially Ethereum. And that's Ethereum versus Bitcoin. But here Ethereum on the USD pair, Ethereum was broke out of that, really that 4K level, started to break over that 4K level yesterday. And that was a little bit of a clue that some volatility was probably coming in Bitcoin. Because you need that money from Bitcoin to flow into the other alts for them to really have that kind of run. So how do you know when these things are gonna happen? After you make an all-time high, you're probably gonna consolidate for a little bit. And we got that consolidation, money flowed into alts, and then we talked about Ethereum hitting all-time high. And then we had some weird kind of low-time frame, like a cascade in some of the servers, or the exchanges rather, where like Bitcoin dropped to like 10K and Binance US, I don't know if anybody really filled. When you see those, when you have those moments of kind of short-term, short-time frame volatility, people tend to panic. And so when that happened, I actually took a little bit of a short just to protect my long positions when I saw that happen. And I actually just covered that short or closed out the short really at 62K on the EMA8 tag. So you've got this cycle where Bitcoin runs, Bitcoin pauses, all coins will run. And that's like the normal cycle. And then we added that kind of exchange volatility today. And so that really caused, this further consolidation we're seeing right now, is Bitcoin gonna roll over a little bit here? Probably not. Certainly not as long as we're holding our rising moving average support, that rising demand. But when it does pause, and hopefully, if it does something nice and neat in the short-term, if it can just kind of churn here for a while, maybe do a short-term ascending triangle or some type of consolidation pattern that will give a little bit of a breathing room, you can allow some of these other altcoins to rise. Ethereum, I talked about Sol, there's some other good ones up there. Dot has been strong as well. Luna as well has been quite strong. I think you go for Ethereum first when you think that Bitcoin is gonna pause for a while. We basically did test the all-time high, didn't quite break it. I think I'm one exchange, maybe it did break it. But for me, it really didn't. You wanna see it across all exchanges to really say, hey, new all-time high. Ethereum is definitely a buy-the-dip, right? You've got pretty well-established horizontal levels, 3650, right here at the lower high for Ethereum, right? We talked about equal... But the question is, why did Ethereum fail to break out on, is that a bad sign or it was expected? I don't know if expected or not. I wouldn't say it's a bad sign because you're still, we're at what? 4100, we're still a lot higher than we have been recently. I think if we're back below 3950 or below that September 5th high, that's a little more weakness, but we don't have that much weakness yet. Think about an ascending triangle. If you think about an ascending triangle, you have a very well-defined resistance and you have kind of a rising demand. So it may stop there and pause a little bit, but when it comes back down, you have aggressive buyers, you have more anxious buyers who jump up the bid and push that rising demand. So an initial rejection is fine. It's not a bad thing per se, especially at a key level, right at that all-time high. I think some people try to get cute, they try to guess the top and then sometimes you get that selling right at the top. But also that happened with that volatility on Bitcoin, where Bitcoin like on some exchanges had dropped right through everybody's bids, people started to panic. So I think it was bad timing for Ethereum. I think if Bitcoin hadn't done that, Ethereum probably would have briefly paused and continued on. But I think Ethereum is one you wanna continue to target. If it gets lower, who knows what's gonna happen over the next few days. Maybe we can get a deeper flush, but if you get lucky, then maybe you can buy Ethereum at 3650, something like that. If you get even luckier, if the whole market starts to really shake around, you wanna have that low ball bid, that bid that you don't think will fill, but if it does fill, you're in a good position, right? You wanna buy the red in an uptrend. You wanna buy a dip in an uptrend. So that's kind of where I think we're at right now, kind of in the shorter term. We're still digesting the ETF, obviously. I think that's a great thing for kind of market confidence that Bitcoin is not just gonna go away. That would be my take on that. Do you think the ETF is gonna be the thing that pushes Bitcoin to 100,000? You know, the whole tail wagging the dog. I think Bitcoin has natural momentum pushing it to 100,000 where you have just not enough supply. I think a lot of people who are buying Bitcoin are taking it off exchanges and they're holding it generally speaking. I think that will push it towards 100,000. I think it definitely helps. There's no doubt about it. I don't think it's a bad thing. It gives some people more confidence to buy it, because Wall Street's getting involved. They've been involved for a while now with other, like GBTC and stuff like that, but it definitely gives them a little bit more confidence. And I think it will push it to 100,000, but I don't think it needed that necessarily, given the natural momentum and natural trajectory on longer time frames like the weekly chart, just a nice beautiful uptrend on the weekly chart. And yeah, I would say that's kind of the direction. And so do you have any price targets that you're looking at specifically for Bitcoin or Ethereum in kind of the current environment? I really hate targets. People ask me that, because I feel like when you focus on a price target, it takes you away from what your job as a technical analyst is to observe the price and look for clues of strengthening a weakening momentum. And that's kind of how I approach this. You know, I don't have a price target on Bitcoin right now, per se. I have support targets. I have the rising MA50 in the weekly. I have the daily EMA8, right? We talked about that 52K level. I have support targets that I want to buy. I've identified levels that I would believe to be kind of a discount. You know what I mean? A discount to the current market, but you can do a Fibonacci extension and you can figure out what the height of a move is gonna be, stuff like that. And if you have a well-defined pattern, you know, like a head and shoulders, like an inverted head and shoulders, you can use that for a target. Like this 80-day rectangle, you could have done that, you could have taken the height of the rectangle and you could have extended out from that a target, which I think was like 55, 60K. So if you have a well-defined pattern, you know, in classical charting, that will give you some type of a measured move, you know, quote unquote type of a target, but when we're in essentially more or less price discovery, we're kind of a brand new territory. You know, I'm not gonna say 74K or 75K, it's a round number, that sounds great. You know, everybody wins. I mean, that's fine. So I really don't have targets. Doesn't work with my style. You know what I mean? And so like, if you wouldn't mind just like walking us through some of like the indicators, I see Bollinger vans, you talked EMA-8, like why do you use some of these things and how does that benefit you when you're doing your TA? So everybody has a different method. I think you need to find the one that works for you. It's kind of taken me a while to get to this point. I start out with, you know, for simple moving averages, I start out, I use the 50 period, which is the orange line. I'm trying to hide some of these other things to simplify it. So I use the 50 period moving average, right? It's a simple moving average. Each candle has an equal weighting. That really helped me back here in April. And if we can observe in April on April 19th, we get our first close below the daily 50 since Bitcoin was around like $7,000 or $8,000, right? So that was a clue, right? That was a data point that the trend was weakening. Even though it was strong, it was weakening, right? So I use that 50 moving average to give me a kind of signal. And on the way back up, that allowed me to kind of buy back in here with confidence, right? Back in July, when we kind of regained that MA-50. You can also use it for a cross. People use the death cross and the golden cross. I don't really pay too much attention to that, especially when there's a big difference between where the price is and where the moving averages are crossing. But you can use those for moving average crosses. Of course, you wanna keep in mind that you need a market, a trending market for a moving average cross to have any kind of power. And you wanna have the price with a close proximity to the cross. I use the blue line, the 200 moving average, by definition and uptrend, rising 200 moving average with the price above it confirming that. So I kind of used the 200 on the weekly chart. The 200 has been amazing for a buy the dip kind of a long term. You see it back here, the double touch back in 18 and then kind of the black swan drop. You were buying Bitcoin near the 200 moving average in the weekly. I mean, that's just a great kind of opportunity, which at some point it will come around again, but maybe at that point, the 200 MA is up here at that point, right? So some of you kind of keep an eye on going forward. So I use that kind of longer term moving average is simple. For a shorter term, I use exponential moving average is the eight, which is the green line. I mentioned that exponential is more price weight into the most recent candle. And I use the 34. So kind of when the price is initially accelerating, it will often use this eight EMA as support and it will bounce between the upper Bollinger and the eight EMA. We're seeing that here right now. We saw that on the weekly chart after we broke above really 14K, that 12, 13, 14K breakout, upper Bollinger to EMA eight, upper Bollinger to EMA eight, right? And you got your first close below the weekly EMA eight, April 19th as well. That was another data point. So that's kind of how I use that eight EMA. You can also use it for a crossing signal. So I talked about a good illustration of that would be here in the daily chart and I'll just remove a couple of things to make it a little bit cleaner. So, and I'll get the Bollinger band out of the way. So if you'll notice, the green line never crossed the yellow. It pulled back, we found support, pulled back, found support and then boom, we finally had our first cross here, a little bit of a fake out and then it crossed back below. So you could see that's another sign of weakening the strength, right? Technical analysis is not about predicting the future. It's about observing the trend. You identify it, you ride with the trend, you can profit from it and you wanna identify data points, ideally horizontal levels, maybe moving averages that will tell you if that trend is strengthening or weakening, right? So that's how you can use that moving average, moving averages for that as a cross, as a potential sign. And then back here, we had the cross back up above, right? We also gained the daily MMA 50 at that point. Do kind of multiple data points. Know as well as if you wanna draw a diagonal line, you got a diagonal break. If you wanna do your horizontal and you wanna be a little more conservative, kind of had your kind of lower high break there as well on that level. So you had a couple of things going on. So that's what I use in terms of moving averages. I use the Bollinger Bands as well. You can think about Bollinger Bands are excellent in terms of helping you to understand how to use your Japanese candlestick signals. You wanna have a reversal candlestick at the lower Bollinger, a bullish reversal candlestick because you need something to reverse, right? And you wanna bear a signal to happen at the upper Bollinger. We had a little tweezer top here. You know, for example, long upper shadow candles at the upper Bollinger is a sign of kind of overextension. So Bollinger Bands are not only tell you when the price is overextended, you know, usually when you dip below it in an uptrend, that's a short-term opportunity, but it also gives you the correct place to use your Japanese candlestick signals. They kind of work really well together. So that's kind of how I use Bollinger Bands. But generally, where do you start? Would you start with dominance index or Bitcoin daily? Where do you start and how do you select which outcome are you gonna invest, for example? It's a great question. So I actually don't have a dominant chart. I actually, I look at the Bitcoin chart and then I constantly, I'm scanning altcoins. And I kind of have a list that I'm observing. And you wanna think about, now your question was a great one, like where do you go, what to play? You wanna think about the concept of relative strength. All right, so when the whole market is correcting, the whole market's correcting, but when it stops and it pauses, you wanna be scanning through, you know, on whatever timeframe, one hour or four hour, your scene, which has the most strength. So whatever was strongest before the correction is most likely to continue back up. So for example, soul has been really strong. So this is one you wanna target, especially if the whole market starts to go up again, right? Luna has been generally quite strong. And what is relative strength? Well, look at Luna. Luna is above its 200 moving average. It's above its 50 period moving average. That's relative strength. Like what is not, what's not as strong as that? Here's VET, VET just barely getting above the 200. Really actually, let's see, LTC barely above the 200. You wanna look at, you know, relative strength, like MATIC, MATIC, look at that. Nice bullish chart, you know, bouncing off its 200 moving average. So you wanna understand which ones are relatively stronger to the other altcoins, and you wanna focus on those. Make a list of what's the, what the strongest coins are, and when you're ready to deploy your funds, you wanna deploy them in the direction of relative strength. You don't wanna be trying to guess down trends, right? You're gonna get burnt, like guessing when a trend is gonna reverse, it's hard if you can be an expert, you know, you're better than me and you can do it, right? You wanna find, you wanna play continuation plays. You wanna buy dips and uptrends, and that's kind of where you wanna focus your attention on relative strength. Awesome stuff. Big Cheds, you are enlightening, not only me, everyone, and I think in the audience, we greatly appreciate you giving all your insights with the charts. This has been absolutely awesome. We definitely wanna have you on again. We appreciate you jumping on today's show, man. Having fun, I'm glad you guys, hopefully you're all doing well, I didn't ask you, but I hope everybody's doing well out there, and every day is a gift, and I'm just enjoying today, you know? Awesome, right on. We appreciate you jumping on, Big Cheds, looking forward to having you on again at some point in the future. All right, take care, fellas.