On Wednesday (27 June 2018), Fundstrat Global Advisors' Head of Technical Research, Robert Sluymer, gave his technical analysis of Bitcoin (BTC) on the “Off The Charts” segment of CNBC's Fast Money and explained why he believes that Bitcoin is currently in “no man’s land.”
Sluymer started by saying that if you look at the 15-day moving average chart for Bitcoin for the period September 2017 to June 2018, you will notice that:
“we have a downtrend in place… and right around the $5800 level is absolutely critical support. A break of that… I think it takes Bitcoin to $5500 and that takes you to the trading range between $5000 and $5500.”
Then, looking at the shorter term 15-day moving average chart (1 May 2018 to 27 June 2018), he observed that two critical support levels, at $7500 and at $7000, had been broken:
“So now what? What do you do? It really is a 'no man's land' from a trading standpoint. I think if you are a very short term trader, you have a critical stop level just around the $5800 level, and the key resistance level that I think Bitcoin has to get through is around the 15-day moving average, that's $6300–$6400. If it can rally through that, I think you've got a chance that Bitcoin is going to start to turn. Until then, the downtrend is intact; you have to respect that downtrend… you've got to wait for confirmation from a price standpoint before implementing long side trades.”
Twodays before his appearance on Fast Money, Sluymer had sent out this tweet:
$BTC and $ETH are bouncing from oversold levels reached this weekend. 4-hour RSI is bottoming but the May-June downtrends, defined by 15-dma's, remain intact and will need be reversed to signal the beginning of any meaningful improvement. pic.twitter.com/wzt5z38wWW
— Robert Sluymer (@rsluymer) June 25, 2018
When asked on Twitter, why he was focusing on the 15-day moving average, Sluymer replied:
Although not widely followed, the 15-day ma is a reasonable proxy for short-term trends that last 2-4+ weeks in crypto along with many other markets. No single ma. is perfect but I’ve found the 15-dma helpful to stay on the right side of shorter-term trends.
— Robert Sluymer (@rsluymer) June 26, 2018
Going back to the show, the host, Melissa Lee, asked Sluymer if he still agreed with his colleague, Thomas Lee, about Bitcoin reaching $25,000 by the end of 2018. He said that looking at the charts now, it was going to be “tough” for Bitcoin to reach that level, and that when you look at trade/investor sentiment, for example on Twitter, it looks “pretty nasty out there.”
According to CryptoCompare, at press time, Bitcoin is trading at $6,113.28, down 0.25% in the last 24-hour period.
You can watch a full video of this segment of Fast Money on the CNBC website.
Featured Image Credit: “Bitcoin” by “Hektor Ehring Jeppesen” via Flickr; licensed under “CC BY 2.0”
