Since October began, Bitcoin has been chopping back and forth around $85,000. In late September it briefly pushed above $87,000, then got knocked back into the $82,000-$84,000 range. At this level, “how do I still make money this year?” has become the question on everyone’s lips, and spot Bitcoin, US stocks, futures and meme coins each have their own camp of believers.
Our view leans cautious. The biggest risk for a small account right now isn’t making money too slowly. It’s getting knocked out of the game before the real opportunity shows up.
A Main Uptrend Needs Three Conditions, and One Is Still Missing
One common framework splits Bitcoin’s price action into two types, and the one that pays best is the “trend opportunity”: a one-way main uptrend. Under this framework, a main uptrend needs three conditions at the same time. Coins have to change hands from holders who bought high to buyers coming in low, with at least a month or two of turnover. Panic has to clear out completely. And the bullish catalyst has to actually land, not just be expected. Past runs fit the pattern: the spot ETFs from Q4 2023 into early 2024, the rate cuts plus the US election in Q4 2024, and the April-to-October 2025 rally after the tariff saga wound down.
Measured against that checklist, today’s market gets a failing grade. The first condition is broadly met: coins did change hands between February and August. Bitcoin dropped to around $60,000 in February and probed roughly $58,000 in late June, with the bottoming range sitting at roughly $58,500 to $82,000. Around September 21 it broke above $82,000, topped out above $87,000, and was then pushed back into the $82,000-$84,000 band.
The sticking point is the second condition. On September 16 the Fed raised rates by 25 basis points to 3.75%-4.00%, in a unanimous vote by new Chair Kevin Warsh and the rest of the committee, and its latest rate projections hint at one more hike before year-end. Oil is what’s driving this: war in the Middle East has pushed energy prices up, and Brent crude has climbed steadily from around $60 at the start of the year. With rate cuts nowhere in sight and the market already debating the next hike, panic has a hard time really fading, and without that, a main uptrend can’t get going.
The price action says as much. On October 5 last year Bitcoin was at $123,000, and it now sits roughly 30% below that. Running up to $87,000 only to be beaten back to around $82,000 tells you money is still on the fence.
US Stocks on “Easy Mode”? SpaceX Says Otherwise
Lately plenty of traders have taken to calling US mega-cap stocks “easy mode”: a market cap above $300 billion, plus being an AI tech name or a recent hot story. The names that keep coming up are Nvidia, Google, Apple, and the new listings SpaceX (SPCX) and SanDisk. The pitch is deep liquidity, shallow drawdowns and a long-term uptrend, which supposedly makes them ideal for low-leverage longs.
Time for some cold water. SpaceX listed on June 12 at $135 a share, raising $75 billion in the largest IPO ever. It hit an intraday high of $225.64 on June 16, then fell to $104.83 on August 3, a drawdown of about 53% in under two months. Bulls will call that “a shakeout of roughly half,” but anyone long at 5x leverage would never have lasted long enough to see it come back. SanDisk is up about sixfold this year, but its market cap is somewhere around $250 billion, which actually falls short of the $300 billion bar.
“US stocks can’t fall that far” only holds if you aren’t using leverage, or your leverage is low enough to shrug off a 50% drop. “Buy the dip and don’t worry about getting trapped” sounds safe, but before you actually pull the trigger, work out your liquidation price yourself.
Futures and Meme Coins: It All Comes Down to Ammo
Trading futures really just means turning the cycle view above into a long or short call: buy dips in a main uptrend, sell rallies in a high-level range, and after a big drop, lean short early in the bottoming range and long later on. There’s one approach that seasoned retail traders swear by: go long Bitcoin around $60,000, push the liquidation price below $30,000 or even $20,000, then sit tight and keep an eye on funding rates. Put simply, that’s using ultra-low-leverage futures to mimic spot, which is a world away from the “get rich on futures” most people have in mind.
As for futures on altcoins and manipulated “demon” coins, our advice is to stay away. Market makers often control more than 90% of the supply, funding rates are extreme, and retail traders can’t win that game in futures. If you do come across one, the most you should do is take a quick bite with spot. Meme coins need two things to line up at once: a language community with huge traffic or a big-name backer, and a rising Bitcoin with greed across the market. That’s how the recent “Niu Lai” and last October’s “Binance Life” took off. But don’t forget that the frenzy was followed immediately by the October 10-11 liquidation cascade, which wiped out about $19 billion in positions across the market. Hype and stampedes tend to sit very close together.
Before picking a coin, do the math: if you throw $500, $1,000 or $5,000 at a meme coin each time, how many shots does your capital actually give you? Plenty of people are hoping one trade will turn everything around. Very few can take several shots in a row and still be in the game. The more realistic path is to build capital by swing trading major coins and large-cap stocks, lie low until the opportunity comes, and only then touch the high-risk stuff. That way, even if you lose, you’re still at the table.
Cycles, positioning, sentiment: every crypto cycle has people talking about these, and none of it is new. But in a rate-hike cycle, one unwelcome truth is worth saying out loud: if you want a 10x this year, almost every tool on offer is high-risk. As for when Bitcoin clears the $87,000 hurdle, we can’t give a timeline. It comes down to interest rates and geopolitics. The next FOMC meeting deserves more of your attention than the hype around any meme coin.
This article is a market commentary from our editorial team and does not constitute investment advice.
