Gold Is Outperforming Bitcoin - Can It Continue? | Trading The Market: August 12, 2026

Bijan Maleki and Kris Bullock join Real Vision members to break down the crypto charts, market conditions, and trades that matter right now. They examine Bitcoin and PAXG, as gold begins to show strength again and outpace BTC. They also run through the altcoins showing interesting setups and take live questions from Real Vision members. 👉 Have a question for Kris? Join our Discord channel: https://discord.gg/FTQsrUhD9Z. Let Monarch do your financial 'spring cleaning' for you! Use code REALVISION at Monarch.com to get your first year half off at just $50. Today’s sponsor is Plus500 US. Take your trading to the next level with cross-market contracts, from precious metals to key indices, and more. Whether you’re a seasoned trader in the Futures arena or brand new, Plus500’s user-friendly trading platform offers you the advanced tools, market insights, and quick execution you’ve been looking for. Get started with Plus500 for as little as $100 at ⁠https://us.plus500.com⁠. Trading in futures involves the risk of loss. Timestamps: 00:00 - Trading the Markets: Bitcoin, Gold & AI 02:34 - Bitcoin Stalls as ETF Flows Drive the Market 04:50 - Gold Is Outperforming Bitcoin 07:33 - Will the Clarity Act Delay Hurt Crypto? 11:17 - Near Breaks Down as Pump Gains Momentum 15:15 - Hyperliquid, Venice & Monero Show Strength 20:18 - Sui, Solana & Ethereum: Why Layer 1s Are Struggling 29:09 - Why the Bitcoin Halving Didn’t Deliver 33:00 - BNB: Is the Bottom Finally Forming? 36:10 - The Best AI Energy & Data Center Stocks 38:30 - AI Infrastructure: Optics, Nvidia & Semiconductors 47:07 - Palantir, Cloudflare & the AI Application Layer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Happy Wednesday, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Trading the Markets. I'm Bijan Maleki, of course, joined by Chris Bullock, aka Blastoplast. This is the show where we look at the charts, we talk about what's going on in the market, especially crypto market, and we take your questions live. So if you have any questions, drop them into the live chat here in Discord platform, and we will get to whatever we can. We've got, uh, we've got some stuff to go over today. Markets, you know, doing what the market does.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  If you've bought Trump's media's API, you are, you know, now involved in, uh, you're getting in on the inside. Uh, reports are that anywhere, um, hedge funds are paying anywhere between $60,000 and $100,000 a month to be inside traders. It's crazy. We're not that here, but we do try to give you a nice inside look in what's going on in the crypto markets and the charts. So thank you for joining us, Chris. What's going on today?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I figured we would, uh, start with Bitcoin, talk about that a little bit. And then I want to actually talk about Pax G some. Um, and then, you know, the usual cast of characters that we all go through. And then I feel like, uh, I know we don't spend a whole lot of time typically talking about stocks and AI stuff, but since I put out that note yesterday on the platform and it's gotten quite a bit of play, uh, I feel like we could, you know, look at, look at some stuff over in that arena as well, because there were a number of charts and a number of, you know, I had to make a choice. I couldn't just pick everything because there's a lot of stuff in there. So I, I picked some, but there's also some that kind of didn't make the cut. And I figured I'd talk about maybe why I did or didn't pick one over another. And, you know, because some people asked in the comments, you know, have you, have you looked at these? Have you looked at those? What about this? And it's like, yeah, I have.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Um, but again, there's just, you know, there's only so much money to go around. So, yeah, I thought we could, you know, dig into some of that too and, uh, see what that looks like. But, uh, yeah, let's, let's start with Bitcoin.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Um, so

• 2:12Speaker 00

  I think those people asking about, uh, if you've looked at this and looked at that, I think they're asking because they're probably holding it. But anyway.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah, I know. Yeah. And some of them are good. Like, there's nothing wrong with a lot of them. They're, they're great holds too. It's just like, you know, again, there's, it's not like I have 10 million bucks that I can throw at, at all of these. So it's just, you gotta, you gotta pick some and some don't make the cut. But anyway, um, so let's look at Bitcoin first. Bitcoin is annoyingly just plodding along at, at resistance, you know? So I have this purple box here that I've drawn. This is the, the, the range, the horizontal range that it was in, um, really for the whole year until it lost it, uh, back here at the beginning of June. And it's just been plodding around here. It's, it, it made its way up. It tried to close above it and then it's been rejected and it's up and it's down.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  And it's kind of, we can see this, this yellow line here is the 200, uh, 200 week moving average, which I've talked about is kind of the, the line in the sand, the hopefully is kind of the bottom support, um, that historically has held as support. So it's like sitting right on this line and kind of riding this, and it's kind of getting squeezed, we can see, because on the bottom side, we have the 200 week moving average. And on the top side, we have this just horizontal technical range. And so it's, you know, it's got, well, again, it's getting squeezed. It's got, uh, forces on the bottom and the top side. And then right in the middle of it, we've got this 10 week moving average, kind of splitting the difference. And so it's all just sitting there in this flat sideways crunch.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Um, and, you know, nothing is happening, but the interesting thing, uh, oh, wait, let me, before I move on, uh, what I've seen is looking at the ETF flows, it's almost kind of tick for tick lately. Like, we knew the ETFs were ugly, ugly for a while, and then they were just kind of flat for a while. And then last week it had a pretty big week. In fact, the biggest week that it's had, uh, you know, going all the way back to whatever, like the middle of April, but then we're back down again on the week. And so if we look at this, you know, up last week, down this week, kind of move back to the chart, it's, you know, up last week, down this week. So it's like, this is again reinforcing the notion that Bitcoin is moving as the ETFs move. Like the ETFs are really the, the primary marginal buyer and seller of Bitcoin right

• 4:26Speaker 01

  now. And that's also, we can also see that exemplified by the, by the Coinbase premium index is still well into the negatives. So, you know, this is also showing retail hasn't come back yet. Retail's not doing anything. ETFs aren't doing much, and Bitcoin is moving as the ETFs move. But we know that like, I talked about last week, how the financial conditions have eased, and they've continued to ease. So it's now two weeks in a row, we're looking good there. And we're starting to see that, uh, come through in the price of gold. Gold is bouncing exactly as the, the financial conditions are. So like, if we look at Pax G, for example, we can see Pax G is rounded up nicely out of the bottoms, uh, you know, it's, it's coming back up to reclaim the, the 20 week moving average here and looks good.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  And then if we look at like the Pax G, the Bitcoin Pax G chart, or rather Pax G against Bitcoin, we can see that it's actually breaking out and in a new uptrend. And if I kind of look at it on this framework here, um, let me go here.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  We can see that it's actually about to trigger like a proper mega trend flip to the green, you know, to the upside. We can see we have double, uh, green dots here. It's above the track line. It's got a nice D mark reset down here. It's only at a one and a two on the up count. So like, gold looks pretty good against Bitcoin. And I'm like, I'm thinking I maybe, you know, if you're, if you're, if you've got idle cash sitting in crypto, or you're waiting to kind of stack into some Bitcoin, you know, it looks like gold sort of has the edge at the moment. Gold is capturing some of that risk on movement that we're seeing come out of, uh, you know, the cash positions already on the TradFi side. It hasn't, it hasn't worked its way into Bitcoin yet, but it's working its way into gold. And so, um, this caught my eye and this looks interesting.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  And I think at the close of this week here, uh, I, I'm expecting this, this mega trend to flip green, you know, because we had a nice close above it last week, an even bigger close above it this week with a close above kind of the horizontal resistance level. So if it can keep this momentum, um, I think this is going to flip green and that's going to be something that probably holds for some time. So I like what I'm seeing on the gold side. I think it looks good and, um, I think that's interesting, you know? So, yeah, gold.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Pax G.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  And then, yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, I was a little surprised, honestly, to see it because, you know, or to see it outpacing Bitcoin, because I knew Bitcoin has been, you know, looking like it almost wanted to break out. Like, if we go back and look at this chart real quick on Bitcoin just by itself, like, it's gotten close, it's back above its mega trend finally. It closed above it nicely last week. And I thought, man, if it can, if it can put in one more week like it did last week, put in a green week and kind of close above this previous level, it too would flip this signal green. And then we'd be like, kind of off to the races with Bitcoin. Um, but sure enough, no, you know, it kind of pretty much engulfed last week's candle, came up with another red dot here.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  So it's pretty much given back any momentum that it started to have last week, which was really kind of frustrating, you know? So, eh, eh, with Bitcoin. I mean, I know it's sort of in that.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  Do you think clarity, the, the clarity being punted to September and now looking like it might not even pass even then? Do you think that kind of rained on, on the parade we might've been seeing?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Sure. Yes, perhaps. I mean, there's definitely something to that. Um, one thing I've noticed though, that I've seen come out of that, um, is there's other, like the, the CFT, I'm sorry, the CFTC and the SEC have rulings in place, like rule, rules being established where if the Clarity Act does kind of melt down and disappear, they're going to kind of take it upon themselves to actually start implementing rules, which I think is a positive step. So they're going to be like, okay, well, if, if Congress can't get their act together and push this through, then we're gonna, we're gonna start doing that on our own. And I know that's a slippery slope because like, that's kind of exactly what we had with, with Gensler last, last time around with the last administration. And everybody was like, you don't have the right to be doing this.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  You know, this is, this is up to Congress to be making these rules and putting these in place. And so there's a lot more room for interpretation, I guess, when you have the CFTC and the SEC just making rules on their own. But thankfully, at least in the moment, they're both pro crypto in their, you know, underlying stance. So they're going to do things that are in favor, that will hopefully advance things, um, that might help pave the way for a further legislative act to, to finally take place. But I, I've kind of come back around to the idea that this might not be such a bad thing. Uh, yeah, it's like, of course, the, the optimal thing would be for clarity to pass. Um, I don't think it's going to. I know they've, you know, they filed cloture and they are going to actually have a vote

• 9:13Speaker 01

  technically on, I think, September 15th when it comes up. So there will be a vote. I don't think it'll pass is my gut feeling. Um, but I, like I said, that both of the, the, or the regulatory organizations have new rules teed up and ready to go, uh, in the event that it falls through. So.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  You know, some kind of a silver lining, I guess, a little bit. Uh, we'll see, we'll see ultimately what that looks like. Obviously, it's not gonna, it's not gonna cover everything that the Clarity Act did. It's only gonna be portions of it. Um, like, I don't think yield is gonna be a factor in any of these rulings. I think it is gonna be more to do with like, you know, token launches and safe harbor and, um, things like that, you know, deeming things, classifying things properly and, you know, the taxonomy of the, the, the token types and things like that. So it, it will be helpful, but it's not gonna be, again, as all encompassing as, as what the Clarity Act, uh, brought. So where that leaves the, the yield instruments, uh, and the banking sector, I don't know, because the banks technically won't have won if Clarity fails.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  You know, like, the banks are the ones who are pushing back against, like Coinbase, uh, giving yield on the, on the stable coins and things like that. So if the vote falls through, kind of, nobody wins. And I don't know what, does it just stay status quo in that case? Does Coinbase kind of just keep doing what they're doing because there is no ruling technically? I, I think, um, so that'll be interesting to see. Uh, but, but, but yeah, in the meantime, to answer your question, yes, probably it had some impact. You could argue too, that, um, the, the, the coin, uh, coin card, cold card, cold card hack had some impact, though I will say that, you know, at this point, the fact that it's only down as little as it is, I think is, is overwhelmingly a positive step.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  I mean, the fact that it didn't sort of nuke Bitcoin, um, and the rest of the crypto market, I think is, is, is a solid sign, though that probably comes back to the notion that because largely the, the, the nominal buyer of Bitcoin is ETFs, they, they were not impacted whatsoever in that, that hack and, and wouldn't ever be. And so, um, yeah, yeah, I don't know. Um, anyway, where was I? Uh, let's, oh, so I got a couple alts I wanted to point out, uh, that are doing interesting things that have caught my eye. Some of them, we talk about a lot, but, um, the first one is Near, and, and unfortunately not for a, a good reason, but Near has basically lost whatever momentum it had.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  It was in this nice uptrend, you know, it was coming off the back of this big positive candle here, and it's pretty much broken, it broke the, the diagonal trend line a while back, and then it's pretty much broken the, broken the 20-week moving average, and now it's on the verge of breaking just its sort of primary horizontal level that it had been holding. So Near is breaking down. It's officially like a broken, a broken uptrend, a broken thesis, if you will. Like, if you were buying, if you bought Near somewhere in this vicinity, thinking, oh, I'm, you know, it's gonna keep going, I'm gonna ride this, that, that no longer is valid, that has been invalidated. So you have, I guess, a choice to make at this point. Uh, just, but know that if you're gonna continue to keep holding this, you're potentially

• 12:23Speaker 01

  riding it down, uh, you know, as far as it could go, and it might keep going for a while. It's no longer, like I said, it is no longer in an uptrend. Um, so be, be wary of that, you know, like, don't, don't, don't be a bag holder right now in this bottoming phase of the crypto market, I feel like is, is something I want. Uh, right now is when you kind of need to be tactical and don't just sort of buy on faith, thinking something is gonna end up at a certain level in a certain number of months or years from now. You know, we've, we've seen that that has proven to be a risky approach in, in crypto. You have to kind of be more sort of mercenary and tactical and, uh, just sort of take what, what a chart gives you and, and get out, you know, once, uh, once it goes away. And so I would say Near has officially reversed.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Um, this is not speaking anything to its fundamentals. I, I, I agree fundamentally, it's got good things going, but you just have to go with what the market is telling you, and right now, the market is telling you that this uptrend, uh, has been broken. So, uh, do with that what you will. And then moving on, Pump, Pump is, Pump is moving the opposite direction. Pump has actually really come on strong of late. Um, it's fully reversed its weekly downtrend, uh, I mean, on multiple levels, so it's way above its, both of its 10 and 20 moving averages, it's now had a bullish crossover, the 10 is back up above the 20. So this is like, you know, moving up kind of with, with a bullet, like with momentum. And if we look at it here, I think it even has like, yeah, let me zoom in on this one,

• 13:50Speaker 01

  on the, uh, on the trading alpha, big, you know, a green, a thrust arrow here, it's sort of several green dots in a row, green candles, holding well above the track line, um, just lots of momentum to the upside. And, um, you know, it's, I mean, it's even overextended outside of its bull and jiband. So like Pump looks really good. I know Pump is generating a lot of revenue right now, and that's interesting because like, as we talk about, um, the, the companies that you wanna be in as far as crypto assets are, are the ones that are generating real world money, that have real world users, and, and Pump is definitely in that category. In fact, I've been reading that in certain weeks over the last month, Pump has actually generated more revenue than Hyperliquid. So that's massive, you know?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Hyperliquid's been in a bit of a, a bit of a consolidation, a bit of a wobble, which we'll look at, but like, yeah, Pump is, Pump is moving. So like, I think that's something that, you know, people shouldn't fade, shouldn't disregard. I mean, if you look at this, like, just on this chart alone, uh, it's been a red mega trend in its, for the entirety of its history, basically, and until, until just now, until like in the last month, it's finally flipped it green, and, um, it looks like, it just looks like it wants to rip. I mean, it's setting new higher highs, it's above its 200-week or 100-day moving average cloud, um, just, again, really, really solid momentum from, from a technical standpoint with this chart. So I, I, yeah, I really like the look of this one. And then kind of moving on to Hyperliquid, like I said, Hyperliquid does look like it's bouncing finally.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  It did find support at its 200-day moving average, which I'm, I'm grateful for, honestly. Um, I did touch about this in the report that I put out last week, the, the crypto portfolio report, that like, despite Hyperliquid's price action looking shaky, uh, its usage is still setting higher highs, like in terms of open interest, in terms of active users, active addresses, um, you know, fees generated, it's still right in the mix. It's, it hasn't, it hasn't faltered at all really with that. So I think this is more just a consolidation of the price, like the token price got a little bit overextended, and, you know, we see that a lot. Um, also, like I've been saying too, it's sort of got lumped in with the, the NASDAQ correction, like its chart was very much following the NASDAQ, and now that the NASDAQ

• 16:04Speaker 01

  is bouncing, so too is Hyperliquid, which again, not surprised to see. So, um, I think, you know, Hyperliquid is looking good, especially from like a fundamental standpoint and a user standpoint, um, and that's what's important. So as long as that continues, as long as those trends continue, I, I think ultimately it's, it's fine. And again, it found support at a key moving average level. Venice also looking like it's, you know, holding support on its 200-week moving average cloud. It's a little bit more kind of horizontal, like wed, like just choppy sideways than, than Hyperliquid looks, but, um, it too has found support, it too is generating money, and, um, it, it's holding up better than most. So, yeah, um.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  You know, one thing that happened, well, one thing I thought of, that, well, Venice came to mind recently with that announcement from Nvidia, that joint announcement with Nvidia and BlackRock, you know, six firms that are, um, what, investing $500 billion into all of this? And then the minute, the minute, the first thing that came to my mind was that inference is going to go through the roof because of this, because that investment is not gonna work if you don't have the inference from, from, you know, the Venises of the world as well. So I think Venice plays out well in this scenario on the crypto side of it. Um, yeah, so can I say that's holding up?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally, I agree. Um, and kind of like we talked about on the Monday show, like, there's gonna be so much just agentic traffic coming, um, and, and, and everything else too. So, yeah, yeah, that was a good, good investment on their part, I think. Um, oh, and so another one interesting that sort of has flipped the tides a little bit, uh, finally breaking back above its 200, uh, 200-day moving average cloud is Monero. Um, also two green dots here in a row too, so like, Monero has, has managed to kind of flip the trend and break above some key levels. And we know Monero generally kind of grinds upwards in a, like, if I zoom this out, Monero

• 18:08Speaker 01

  just sort of goes in this long grindy uptrend for a long time anyway, but it had been correcting like everything else on the year. Um, but it's, you know, it's breaking above some key levels like it needs to, um, and, you know, right around the time the financial conditions are easing too. So it's, it's looking good. In fact, over the last recent stretches, looking even a little bit better than Zcash. Zcash has just been literally just flat, like doing, doing nothing. So, um, yeah, well.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Oh, also Uniswap is another one that, Uniswap's interesting because it had broken out, they've implemented some new, uh, structural changes within their, with their system, and it had been benefiting from a lot of that, and it broke up above, it got above its 200-day moving average cloud, but then immediately just gave it all right back. And I don't exactly know what happened, but it flipped some pretty ugly signals. Like, it's still above the mega trend here, but if we, if we look at like the trading alpha, um, immediate sort of reversal flag, and then this X is like a trend ending warning, and then, you know, immediately lower, lost its green dot. So this is like, these are red flags to be sure. And certainly if it, if it closes this week well below this, um, this wick here on this reversal candle, it will sort of have confirmed this reversal.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  So I'd like to see it bounce from here, but, um, you know, this is a pretty strong rejection that we're seeing from, from, uh, Uniswap here at this level, which was interesting to me.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  So yeah, anyway, that's kind of what I got with crypto. There's obviously any, any number of ones we can dig into if anybody has any questions. But outside of that, I wanted to look at some of the, some of the AI stocks, some of the AI portfolio like I touched on and, talk about, you know, why I went with the ones I did a little bit more and, and some of the other ones that, that I had looked at that kind of didn't make the cut and, but that, but that are still good too. So.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, before we do that, let's take Loopy's question here.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Uh, Loopy so kindly asking on behalf, behalf of Ruth. What is everyone's opinion on Sui?

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Let's take a look at Sui.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  Everyone is you, Chris. So what is, what is your opinion on Sui?

• 20:23Speaker 01

  So.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Hold on, let me look at a couple of different ones here. Sui.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Sui's having a rough time, I'll say, um, is, oops, is, is the first thing. I don't know, like, kind of what I, I'll repeat what I've said in the past with regards to Sui. Is right now it doesn't have a bid from a technical standpoint. It's just, it's, it's kind of trending down. It's not keeping the same levels as a lot of the other, you know, cohorts that, that are sort of in its same category, some of the other layer ones and things like that. It's not trying to push up against resistance, even like Bitcoin is. But I will say that like just layer ones in general don't look that great right now. Like to be fair, it's not like Ethereum or Solana look all that great either, you know?

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Like if you look at Ethereum, it's still way below its, it's, uh, you know, big moving average cloud. It's, yes, it is kind of budding up against resistance, the same way Bitcoin is, but it's not really showing a ton of strength. It's certainly not setting higher highs. And then the same thing with Solana. And in fact, Solana looks a lot closer to what Sui looks like than, you know, Ethereum even. So it's not like Sui is performing significantly worse than everything. But also it's definitely not performing better than anything either, you know? So, um, I mean, you can kind of chalk it up a little bit to just sector wise, like the, the big layer ones aren't really

• 21:49Speaker 01

  market darlings at the moment. Like the stuff that's really catching people's attention are that are more of like the protocol level stuff, like your hyper liquids and your, your pumps and the projects, the individual projects that are generating massive cash flow. Like those are the ones that, and you know, taking that cash flow and, you know, giving it back to the token holders through either yield or buybacks or whatever. Like those are the, those are the ones that are capturing a lot of the buzz right now. And so you kind of go back to the layer ones and they're just kind of boring at the moment.

• 22:21Speaker 02

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• 22:39Speaker 01

  We can of course talk about the, the, the on-chain activity and the usage, and that's not really doing much either. But again, to be fair, it's not like Solana or Ethereum are in major uptrends in that regard either. So. I don't know. Um, I, for me personally, I just look at these and I, I kind of just, I, I go with what the chart tells me with, with any crypto assets right now that, that I'm going to be invested in. Um, I, it's, it just has to be in an uptrend. Otherwise, don't hold it. I mean, period, you know? You, you have, like I said a minute ago, you have to be tactical, you have to be mercenary. You, you, we need to move away from the idea of just this blind faith that someday,

• 23:19Speaker 01

  whatever, whether it's Sui or Near or Solana or whatever, I'm not singling anything out, but it's going to be at, you know, it's going to do a 10x from here or 100x from here. Like, I think you're, those days of, of operating in the crypto space like that are not over, but it's become more and more challenging. And so you have to, again, you have to be tactical, you have to play the charts and, um, right now the chart isn't giving me anything with Sui. So, uh, I, I, I, because of that, I, I wouldn't be holding it. And so, you know, I know, okay, let me say that it's not lost on me, obviously, that a lot of you are holding Sui and have been for a long time and have written it down quite a ways. And I get that.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying that, so that's why I'm saying I don't think Sui is dead. I don't think it's any more dead than anything else, you know? Um, I just think that we're, it's going to have, it's going to take a while for the market to kind of come back around and for a lot of these layer ones to ramp back up and for activity to ramp back up. And, um, we'll see how it shakes out, you know?

• 24:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  I don't know how it's going to shake out. I can't tell you. So.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  I think what a lot of people have a tough time reconciling with, or you're just even understanding, if right, the technicals obviously show one thing, but like for, for, I don't even know how long have we been talking about that the underlying macro is, is like building up and it's bullish, right? In Solana's case, for example, you have MoneyGram that's running a node now on Solana, you have BlackRock, what, uh, not Fidelity, what's, um, Citadel and all of these that are actually like building AutoWatch. I don't know, don't quote me on Citadel. But like a lot of firms are actually building on Solana, but we have, we're not seeing that in the price action, right? And then, and then you take, on the other side, you take the agentic economy stuff.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  And that's Sui and Near's like bread and butter. And that's what they're focusing on is capitalizing on the agentic economy. Agentic economy, as we talked about on Monday, is like rearing up. It's like super bullish. It is ready to explode it essentially, but we're not seeing that with those either. So like, I think that's also another thing that people are like, just kind of confused about, you know, it's like, all of this great stuff is happening, but I'm not seeing it in the chart. And it's like, what gives? Why not? And I think that's a, that's a question on a lot of people's minds these days.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think you're spot on. I think another thing to keep in mind too is like Sui at the moment is also inflationary. There's still, you know, token overhang, there's unlocks coming. Um, and there's not, as far as like the Sui token, again, it doesn't, you know, they're not generating massive fees and burning it and, you know, doing buybacks and, uh, or yield heavily and giving back to the token holders, like a lot of things. So like, those dynamics don't exist for Sui and, and because of the fees being so microscopic on Sui too, I'm not sure how that ultimately plays out. Like there's, it's not like you have to buy even like Ethereum back in the day when you needed to have a bunch of ETH on hand just to pay for gas, to pay for transactions and stuff like that. Transactions on Sui are, I mean,

• 26:23Speaker 01

  they might as well be free. They're virtually free.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Near zero, yeah.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  And so like where, where's the, where's the need to own or have Sui outside of just a, for, for speculative reasons, I guess, you know, like there's no mechanical reason to, to, to own it. So. I, I, I don't know.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  I mean, I see what they're doing with the near zero fees, right? Their idea is capturing the agentic economy and their thinking is, well, if we have millions upon millions of agents transacting on Sui, doing millions upon millions of transactions, those near zero fees are going to add up, right? And, and if you are having agents on networks, like a, you know, fee structure like ETH is just impossible to use something like that, right? Cause imagine you have an agent making a call and then you have an agent buying, that's two separate transactions. God knows how much, you know, gas fees are going to pay in that. So I do see the value, it's just, I, I don't think the agents have come yet. That's, I think that's, that's, that's the problem, right? So.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Uh, you're, you're spot on there. And, and I mean, you know, as always, I, I'm rooting for those guys. It's a really good team. I think they're doing good work. I think they've got good ideas.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  But it's just, you know, we'll, we'll see. And, you know, I say a lot of the, a lot of the same stuff I'm talking about here could be applied to ETH. I've said the same thing about ETH being great tech, but kind of a terrible investment at the moment, you know, like, and I don't see it for the same reasons. I don't see a reason to be holding ETH either, uh, at the moment. And so.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not a particular. Sorry, go ahead.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  I was just, I'm just kind of down on layer ones as an investment in general right now, you know? The only one that's got me a little peaked and it's still early days is that new, uh, hyper liquid competitor that's going to launch on Solana, that, uh, uh, the, the, the GTO product, JTX, I think it's called. That's going to be interesting because it's going to be running on the base chain. So it's going to be doing all of these massive order book, you know, trading and, and live, you know, major action on the base chain, not on a layer two, like, like some of these other, uh, perp decks and stuff. And so that could actually create real demand for Sui. Um, I'm sorry, for Solana.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  And so that's going to be interesting to see how that plays out, but it's not, you know, it's not live yet. It's still in beta. So, um, I'm curious about that. I'm curious just about the performance of that too. Because it's going to be, you know, their liquidation engines and stuff are going to be co-mingled with regular meme coin traffic and, and whatever else is going on, you know, at the same time. And so, uh, but, um, that's, you know, that's something that could generate real demand for the actual, uh, Solana token, whereas Sui and, and Ethereum aren't, aren't in the same boat at the moment. But, um.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  You know what's interesting? You know what's interesting? I was like, as you were talking about that, I was just thinking about what the hell happened to the post-having pump that we that we had become so in so expecting. You know, we had it in what 20, the 2020 having, we saw that pump in 2021. Same with the 2016 having, we saw in 2017, and we had the 2024 having, 2025 came. Uh, I guess you could argue that, you know, the Trump bump is what kind of did it when uh, it was it, but didn't really seem like that was that was the the having bump, but I don't know. I don't know. This market really, you can make a plan and it'll laugh in your face.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  It's funny, like, let's kind of dig into that for a second, actually. So here's the havings. Um, it's it's kind of this this sort of thesis that I've had in my in my head for a little while now is that the havings played a little bit less of a direct role, as maybe people thought. I think the having absolutely does play a role in that it reduces the the inflation rate. So the the the supply of Bitcoin floating around, being created every day, does get dropped in half. But um, so really what that does is it kind of just serves to juice whatever otherwise underlying economic action we had going on already.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  So like, if there was going to be demand, certainly in the case of like COVID, for example, this probably caused Bitcoin to go up quite a bit more than it otherwise would have because right around the same time, the supply dropped in half, like literally right, you know, right here, and then COVID rip. Um, but that's not to say that had we not had that having, it wouldn't have gone because we knew that the, you know, the massive influx of liquidity from COVID and everything was going to cause it to move anyway. Um, kind of the same thing back here, like, you know, the the supply got dropped in half again. Um, but there were economic reasons that caused this. There were less, less so in this this range here. So like, the having did cut it in half, but um, by this point,

• 31:33Speaker 01

  the in the fourth having now, it was already being cut in half from a small number to an even smaller number. Whereas back here in the beginning, it was a very big number to a slightly smaller big number, you know? And so it's not going to have, each successive having isn't going to have as big of an impact in terms of its supply reduction, so that comes into play. But also, just, I do think that the overlying uh macro conditions have a bigger outsized impact on what the market's actually going to do than just the having does on its own. So um, yeah, kind of all of that. Um, and you know, as we've talked about, I've I've repeated in in in previous

• 32:14Speaker 01

  episodes, how there wasn't really a lot of direct economic stimulus happening this for for the past three years. You know, there was, that's why the market was largely flat for huge stretches of time. And really, were it not for just the ETFs, like, you know, the ETFs coming along in in like this stretch here, and then kind of the Trump, the Trump bump here. Um, outside of that, Bitcoin has kind of done nothing, you know, because again, the economics weren't anything really up until up until kind of now, you know? And so um, with that in effect, it makes sense that this having would have had less of an impact overall than than previous one. So I don't know, that's just kind of my general, general thought on how that picks out.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm sure the tariffs and the war and just the perception as well of, you know, the Trump family and their involvement in crypto has also absolutely not helped.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Um, all right.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  So yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Um, let's um, let's just take, can we just take a look at B and B? Uh, and then, and then we can move on to some AI stuff.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  So yeah, B and B, um, it's kind of coming around. Let's see what it looks like here.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  It had flipped its mega trend a little while back, um, but it's been still pretty, I guess tepid, is it's a good word to describe it. Um, even though it had done that, the 200, uh, 200 day moving average cloud had remained in a downtrend, but if we look, we can see that we had a bit of a bullish crossover um, back here in Jul- in July, when the exponential 200 day uh flipped above the uh, simple moving average. And so this is showing that we're starting to see a bit of a, some bullish momentum, I guess, to the upside, which is good. And then, but it's still not back over the level. It's really not back over the key level yet. And of course, it's still in a pretty ugly downtrend here, or rather, not out of its bottoming pattern, I should say.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  It's, you know, got a red track line, it's still got red candles, even though the dots have disappeared. It's just not really, it's not really reversing the trend yet. It's more in like bottoming pattern, structure than trend reversal structure, I I'll say, so. Um, yeah, that's that's kind of where it's at. Like, if we were looking at some of these other charts in terms of like, you know, how it broke down below its its previous horizontal range, um, like Bitcoin and ETH, and it has broken back up into that range. So it's, you know, showing decent relative strength from like a, like a structural standpoint, which we can see too, because you know, it's, it it never got even as as bad as Bitcoin did in terms of getting near its uh, 200 week moving average.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  But I don't know, all this to say, it's kind of hanging in there. It's a little bit stronger than some, but it's not as strong as some of the the big outliers, you know, like like Pump and like Hyperliquid and and some of these other ones that we talk about. Um, it hasn't really broken above its its 200 day moving average, which I think is kind of the key line in the sand. Like, if I go back to here, you know, a lot of the ones that we look at that are doing well are above this level here. And uh, B and B just isn't yet. Which is interesting to me because B and B does have buyback and burn. Also, B and B has the whole, they've got that layer too, that whole blockchain that they run. So there's demand for the B and B token, there's benefits to holding the token. So it's it's, that's probably what's helping it do as well as it is.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  But um, also, it's a big market cap. It's, you know, we know it's one of the biggest market caps in the space. So it takes a lot more buying and selling to move the needle with B and B than than, you know, say Pump.Fun, for example. So like, that's going to play into it also. Um, I mean, it's a big, heavy, bloated legacy alt really at this point. But I think overall, historically, it's still done better than most and probably stands to continue to do better than most. So, yeah.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  All right, there we have it. Uh, let's, yeah, let's, let's, let's end, uh, end the day with a few, um, few of the AI stuff that you want to look at.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  So, yeah, um,

• 36:30Speaker 01

  I'll kind of just go through the sectors. Uh, let's look, let's kind of dig into the ones, uh, the ones that I got, and then maybe some other ones within that sector. So, starting with energy, because I have that at the top, um, I went ahead and went with Eaton. So uh, I had been holding Bloom, Bloom Energy for a while, and Bloom actually, Bloom looks good. I mean, it kind of, you know, bottomed out, uh, along with everything else. It got hit pretty good. It had been in a downtrend for a while, uh, but it was really just consolidating. And I think Bloom stands to remain in the picture still. I think this is a good example of it here, looking at this indicator. It's like, yeah, it it came down and bounced perfectly off of its track line, kind of held the track line green for the most part.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  It did flip red for a second, but it's on the way up, it's lost its red dots, it's looking to rebound. It's showing strength here. Um, so I like Bloom, I think Bloom is still going to be in the picture going forward, but um, I kind of pivoted because Bloom is a different type of product. I mean, Bloom actually makes power generation equipment, you know, fuel cells and things like that. Whereas Eaton, Eaton is more on like the mechanical switching side. They actually make the products that direct electrical flow, electricity flow and and things like that. Um, and so I just, yeah, I just wanted to kind of come at it from a different angle, and I liked what Eaton was doing. I like the fact too, that if you look at Eaton, uh, in this downtrend that we had, I mean, it really just,

• 37:51Speaker 01

  it wasn't even phased by it, like, it didn't come back down hardly at all and look like it needed to test support at its 200 day moving average cloud. It really just kind of blew through that that big correction, like it wasn't even there. Like, it just pretty much treaded sideways the whole time. So I just liked the overall strength of it. I think it looked really good, and and I like the fact that um, it's, you know, just continuing to plod along and and break, it's starting to break out now that everything is correcting and moving back up, and it's starting to set higher highs. So it it caught my eye, it looked like it just had the most relative strength really in this sector, and I liked what it was doing. I like the fact that Eaton is going to be a part of pretty much any data center built out in the world, you know?

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Um, to to some degree or another, they just, they're so universal with the type of products that they make. So again, it just, it just made sense to me. Um, moving along to optical, optical has been really strong. Like, actually, let me, let me pivot over to this for a second. So this is this chart I made showing the uh, the the individual sectors and how they've been performing year to date. And if we can look here, optical is this blue line, and it had a big correction. I mean, it blew up way above everything else and then just kind of, you know, went through the floor. Like, we could tell it got way, way overextended, lost its first place, fell below the whole rack sector, and really just had the biggest correction of the bunch. But coming out of the bounce, it's also had the biggest bounce out.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Like, it's, it's showing that it's clearly the most volatile, but it's also got the most strength. And it actually regained first place over whole rack, took it over, and is back now at the top. And is kind of, again, moving with just major, major momentum right now. So if we go back and look, I was like, I need some exposure to photonics and optics and interconnects for sure, because that looks like it's going to move. And if we look here, just on the day, we've got one, two, three, four, like, almost five assets that are in double digits on the day. So like, this sector, this sector is just crushing it right now. So why did I pick Amphenol over any of these others? Um, honestly, it was a very tough choice, and I could have picked any number of these.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Now, to be fair, some of these are more speculative than others, like AXTI is one that's been kind of ripping out of the gates really good, like, it it put up a a 46% week last week, and then the week prior to that, out of the lows, it was up 27%. So it's been ripping, um, but it's also smaller, it's more speculative, and um, it it just, you know.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Gave me a little bit of pause. Another one, Lumentum is another big, solid one that's kind of been in the mix. And it also bounced really strong out of the gate. It had a 24% week last week. And it was one that was kind of right there in the mix. I almost went with Lumentum. But I just, I just sort of liked, you know, I liked what Amphenol was doing. I liked too that it didn't dip as much as the rest of them. It didn't really lose its trend as much. And just has showed better kind of stability through this correction and less volatility through this correction. And so I, I went with it. But again, I could have picked probably two or three or four other ones in here. And I'll probably look to add more from this sector, kind of in the next round of buying, I think.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  But I had to pick one. I went with Amphenol. But like I said, any number of these would have been good. Coherent is another really good one that looks strong. But if you, if you look, you can kind of see the difference. If, let's look at this. So coherent. This is why I didn't go with some of these because they properly lost their trend. They, they flipped their mega trend green and they went all the way down and deep through their, their 20 day move or 200 day moving average. And yeah, they've had a big bounce, like this one was up 44% last week, but this is proper volatility. This is a proper loss of the trend where if we go back and look at Amphenol. Again, it didn't lose it. It didn't flip the trend. It kept it the whole time. It kept its strength. So that's sort of, you know, just looking at it from a technical standpoint, that's why I kind of went with this.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  So those are sort of the things I'm looking for and you know, sort of why I'm picking some over others. Moving on to semiconductors, briefly, let's back, look back here. We can see semiconductors also have had a nice bounce out of the lows, maybe not quite to the degree of optical or whole rack. But, but semiconductors compared to like these bottom three categories is looking strong too. So I wanted to kind of load back up into semis as well. So in doing so, I, I, I felt like Nvidia was a good choice. And it's funny, I, I talk about, you know, things not losing their trend where we can see Nvidia actually did. But we know, kind of like I mentioned in my note, we know Nvidia is not going anywhere. We know it's the, it's, it's the Bitcoin of this whole list, basically.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  And I felt like it just made sense to have a decent chunk of it, even though I know it's not going to do a 10x. I, I'm not expecting anything major from it, but I do think it's going to be steady grow, steady growth. And I think it's not going to be as volatile and I think it's just going to serve as a good sort of portfolio anchor holding. You know, a good position to kind of stabilize and minimize some of that volatility. And know that I'm going to get good, decent, positive upside from it. So that's why I went with Nvidia. But I also, you know, wanted to get a decent one in Broadcom as well. Broadcom also lost its trend, not, not lost on me here, but it still remains strong. And it wasn't terribly overextended to begin with.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  And it didn't, you know, go undergo as big of a correction and it's almost right back up to its highs. So it just looked strong as well. And yeah, I liked it. But there's, there's a lot of other good ones here. Qualcomm is good.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  These other two semiconductors, KLA and Lattice Semiconductor are both ones that I've held. Marvell is in the mix also.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  But they just, you know, they, they were, Marvell is a good example of one that was really overextended, big correction. And yeah, it's bouncing back up. I'm sure Marvell is going to do fine, but I, that volatility, you know, didn't sit well with me. Like if you look at this chart here, again, compared back to Broadcom, like Broadcom looks a lot more like, yeah, I like this. You know, I like this just steady, steady, eddy, stable, going to keep going kind of thing. So that's kind of why I went with those.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Moving on to whole rack. I wanted a couple here. I, I had, so I had already had a position in Arista Networks and Dell. I bought kind of starter positions in those, in both of these back a month or so ago. Cause they looked like they were just doing, well, I mean, like if you look at Dell, like what, there was no correction in Dell here, basically. Like it, it barely even lost its mega trend. It came nowhere near its 200 day moving average cloud. So like it was rock solid and same thing with, with Arista, you know, it, not quite to the same degree. But I mean, it, it looks solid too. It also didn't really undergo any kind of a correction. So as soon as these really looked solid and a lot of these other ones kind of confirmed mega trend switches.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  I, I kind of loaded up on these. So I actually, you know, doubled down and went into a more full size allocation with Arista. Because it's, I mean, strong out of the gates and, and looking like it's wanting to set, you know, new higher highs. So I liked those. I wanted exposure. You'll note that I didn't actually add any memory back in yet. I, I'm still looking at the likes of Micron and even like the DRAM ETF and you know, SK Hynix and some of these. But they're, they're still really volatile and you know, undergoing a pretty good correction. And also like I've said, I still think that memory, the biggest gains have already been had in memory. I still think Micron is going to go up. Micron is not going to do a 10x from here. Micron is probably not going to do a 5x from here, like I say.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  You know, so I would put Micron more in the category of like, like an Nvidia. Like we know Micron is going to be in the conversation and there's going to be heavy demand for it for the next five years or whatever. But like, I, I got my big gain. I bought Micron first time back at around 180 bucks. So like I rode this for most of this and I'm fine to take those gains and put them into some of these other ones that I think have more upside. And so that's why I'm not in Micron at the moment. That's not to say I won't get back in it or any of these other ones for that matter. There's a lot of good ones in this sector. We can see there's, you know, this one's upset, my, uh, Super Micro is up 17%.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Core Weave is up 19% on the day. So this is another strong sector that I think will rebound and is rebounding. And there's a lot of good ones in here, but I wanted to kind of just, you know, go with stuff that I felt really, really solid with. And then finally getting into the last couple here. I've actually not gotten back into chemicals yet and it's kind of pretty obvious to see why chemicals have been. Yeah, they've bounced out of the gate, but they've been just kind of flat, really. They're not, they're not really setting new highs yet. So I haven't gotten back into them yet. I, that's not to say I won't, but I'm, I'm sitting idle on that for now. And then finally I wanted to, let's talk about like the application layer here real quick.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  So a bunch of these are really small positions. These are all like at the bottom of the stack. Like I've got six positions in this category and, and all of them total combined probably make up about 10% of the stack. So it's, it's kind of the more speculative bottom end of the stack. It's like equate this to kind of my crypto meme coins that I put at the bottom of my crypto stack. Like this is what I'm looking at in terms of, of these here, but I'll go through them real quickly. So Eli Lilly is one. We know Eli Lilly is not a small, it's not a small market cap fringe company or anything by any stretch. But I, I've just got, you know, small exposure to it, but obviously it's doing well. It, it wasn't phased by the correction either at all.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Palantir is an interesting one for me because it's been in a downtrend since November of last year. And finally it broke out, flipped its signal green, broke above its 200 day moving average cloud. And I just liked the look of that. I thought that that was a really strong signal. And I'm hoping that it's going to stay green for basically as long as it stayed red and, and continue ripping. So that was, that was the idea there. Some of these are pretty speculative, like this Tempest AI. I called this one out. I made a note on the platform, like a, a trade idea on the platform. It got stopped out because it, you know, basically peaked right where I entered, came back down, stopped out.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  And now it's right back up where I, where I called it. So essentially I was like a month early on this one. And it stopped me out, but I, you know, maybe I should enter a new trade idea and see if it runs this time around. But either way, I kept it in the portfolio regardless and I think it's still going to go. And then finally a couple, a few software companies and networking companies like CloudFlare. I just like the look of this. I think it's going to be a good, solid sort of agentic AI play. In that it's going to benefit from agentic traffic. And then the same thing with MongoDB, which also again, looks really good and looks like it's breaking out. And then finally ServiceNow. ServiceNow is just a software company. They're like a SaaS company. But they're integrating AI into their products.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  They're changing their, their billing structure from per seat licensing to agentic AI usage. And they've got a nice sticky mode. And so I wanted to just kind of take a flyer on that. Again, a very small position, way down at the bottom of the stack. But I think that this one could benefit too from, this could be one of the few software companies that benefits from AI. And now there's a bunch of other ones in this list too, that I think are good, but I, I'm not going to get into why. But yeah, notice too, I'm sticking away from the hyperscalers and sticking away from the big ones. Because I think that I'm, I'm generally trying to avoid the spenders and go with the people that are actually receiving the money as opposed to spending the money.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Also the revenue is going to be tricky with the, the hyperscalers in terms of how much money are they going to make from, from this AI stuff? We don't, we don't actually know yet. So I'm avoiding the big hyperscalers and I'm sticking with the picks and shovels. And we can see there's a lot more green in this side of the thing, you know, in this side of things than there is just looking at. The, well, the software right now and the hyperscalers right now. So yeah, that's, that's kind of where I'm at.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  All right, everyone. So we talked about crypto. We talked about AI. Talked about the odds of clarity and a lot more. Thank you everyone for tuning in. We'll be back next Wednesday for another edition of Trading the Markets. Until then, let's keep the conversation going in the chats. Also, for those of you, I'm sure a lot of you are aware that are watching this right now. But our website has a new overhaul. Go on and check it out. Start posting notes, trade ideas, because you can get points that will go towards a membership upgrade or even a free membership if enough community members engage with what you're posting.

• 51:12Speaker 00

  So get out there, start posting, bring it into the Discord, chat about your posts and recruit others to go and engage with them. Until then, everyone, we will see you next week. Don't fuck this up.

• 51:24Speaker 02

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