9/5/25 - Market Recap
Even though crypto trading might sound an exciting thing, a market filled with volatility and outsized returns, the reality has been quite different for the past few months. This summer has been quite frustrating to say the least. You can see on the charts below what I mean. Choppy action, with very little follow through.
The charts don’t show the frustration of going through it on a day to day basis. From the outside, it might look like we had a really strong summer. And true, some coins did really explode. Coins like ETH, XRP, XLM, SOL and others.
But the reality is that in aggregate, the market has been quite stale. If you trade directionally like myself, you experienced the same frustration watching your returns go up a lot, and then, the next few days, give back a decent or even at times the entire returns you just made.
Another plot we can look at to show this behavior, is the % of coins above their daily moving averages.
It’s just a good way to visualize breadth of the market. You can see that when there’s been a spike above short-term SMA’s, the next few days it just retraces back down. However, the % of coins above their long-term SMA, shows more of a sustained uptrend. That gives a false sense that the market is strong, but when we zoom in, it has been chopping around on higher timeframes.
In essence, if you’ve done buy and hold in the top assets, you did well, if you traded short-term (swing trading), you probably chopped around most of the summer.
That’s the game we play right? And we can’t complain. I’ve been spending my time on doing a lot of research and just having fun. But I admit, I am a bit looking forward to the end of summer and start of the last quarter, which historically has been a good period for risk markets.
If you’ve been paying attention to my positions, you’ve noticed that since July I’ve been accumulating PUMP on my portfolio.
Since that first purchase , PUMP is up almost 80%.
I’ve been continuously adding into it, and right now, it is one of my largest concentrated positions. My average is lower than the chart below because Extended (this exchange) had a migration to StarkNet, which meant I had to close my original position and re-open it on the migrated platform.
I am mainly a systematic trader and every decision I take, I always want to factor EV (expected value) into it. But sometimes, there comes trades that are almost too good to pass, but that estimation of value, is very much up for interpretation. However, I don’t think PUMP is. Let’s dig into the reason behind the trade and where I think this could go.