Why It's Time To Be Bullish

Summary

• Both hosts arrive at the same place: be bullish here. Bitcoin closed within a $100 band from Thursday through Sunday (96,564 / 96,476 / 96,475) while holding the 100-day moving average, and Jonah publicly retracts his own tweet that sideways-at-the-highs is bearish — “I don’t think I agree with what I said anymore, I should probably issue a retraction.” Both now call any buy below $95k “probably a very good buy.”
• Jonah’s core structural claim: Michael Saylor is not holding up the market — IBIT is. Having sat inside two actual whales (Goldman’s oil desk, then likely Vitol), he says the market misattributes big flows “nine times out of ten”; the real bid is BlackRock’s ETF taking inflows “every single day” while Fidelity’s FBTC outflows are one or two lumpy profit-takers. His frame: “we’re two years into a 10-year upward grind” — the scare signal would be daily IBIT outflows.
• The market must now be traded asset by asset, not up-or-down: BTC is ~10% off highs while the average alt is down 50–90%, OP and ARB sit at 2023 lows, and ETH holders are “ready to jump out the window” — Jonah sold all his ETH after six podcasts of badgering from Avi; ETH is down 50% against BTC since.
• Avi’s bottom mechanism is the tradeable insight: “assets bottom when selling stops,” not when buyers show up — so ask who’s left to sell. Avoid perpetual team-sellers (Worldcoin, likely Aptos), own fully-unlocked assets with catalysts: likely Aave’s fee switch and his “high-probability ETF basket” of LTC, SOL, XRP, DOGE. Jonah’s mirror-image short screen: low liquidity-to-FDV tokens on Dexscreener — he’s large short WIF, small short SUI.
• Universal despair is the setup, not the risk: funds are “super super super heavy in cash,” making upside a lot more asymmetric than downside, while alts sneakily bounce (Venice ~4x off the low in a week, Fartcoin +33%, AI16Z +15%). Closing spine of the episode: “Cycles end when you run out of buyers, not when you have a bunch of depressed people on the sidelines.”
• Macro: Avi thinks Trump is net bullish risk (deregulation, tariff talk as negotiating posture, pro-AI/crypto stance), with one ~15% tail — if Bessent convinces Trump to swap his success metric from higher stocks to a lower 10-year yield, “get out of everything.” CPI Wednesday matters for alt season, but for Bitcoin “it just doesn’t matter — probably higher in two months regardless.” On-record call to check next week: BTC dominance goes down.

Deep dive

1. Bitcoin flatlined at the highs — and Jonah retracts his bear tweet

• The setup: Bitcoin “literally closed within a $100 band every day” Thursday through Sunday — 96,564, 96,476, 96,475 — with eight consecutive daily candles crossing the current price, range-bound since first breaching this level November 21. It’s holding the 100-day moving average, with “bids stacked lower but asks stacked higher — we’re kind of in no man’s land.”
• Jonah’s change of mind, stated as such: he’d tweeted it’s very rare for an asset to consolidate at the highs after a parabolic rise and have that be bullish — “I don’t think I agree with what I said anymore. I should probably issue a retraction.” Bitcoin held the $95k retest he expected to fail, and when Saylor announced a buy this morning, the usual “that’s what was keeping us up” sell-off didn’t happen.
• Why this time might differ: presidential support may have changed investor behavior — people now allocate to Bitcoin the way they 401k into the S&P, a paycheck slice every month. “It’s possible that this time genuinely is different.” Both converge on the level: any buy below $95k “is probably a very good buy.”

2. Saylor isn’t Atlas — the ETF flows are

• Jonah’s whale story, from the inside: at Goldman “we were the whales of the oil market — every time any massive trade went through, the entire market was like oh it’s Goldman, and nine times out of ten we weren’t doing it”; same at likely Vitol with sovereign physical deals. So: “I guarantee you that Michael Saylor is not the one holding up Bitcoin” — he rejects the idea BTC is “hoisted on Saylor’s shoulders the way Atlas lifted the globe.”
• What is holding it up: Farside’s flow dashboard shows IBIT taking inflows “every single freaking day” — the 26-year-old putting 2% of his paycheck in — while the outflows are concentrated in Fidelity’s FBTC and lumpy (days of zero, then $177M, then $287M), which may reflect one big early institutional buyer taking profit. “It’s not about the news or the catalyst, it’s about the flows.”
• The cycle thesis this implies: not a four-year despair-to-euphoria loop but “two years into a 10-year upward grind.” His tripwire: “what would scare me is if I started seeing daily outflows from IBIT instead of daily inflows.”

3. Stop asking “are we going up” — dispersion is the regime

• Avi’s reframe of the whole conversation: “you can’t just talk about up or down, you have to talk asset by asset.” BTC is ~10% off highs; the average alt is down 50–90%; LTC is only 10–15% off on ETF catalysts; optimism and arbitrum sit at their 2023 lows; Worldcoin is making new lows; likely Aave is up ~5x from the 2023 lows yet 40% off its high. “Are we f*ed?” has no single answer — “for Bitcoin holders I don’t think sentiment is bad at all.”
• ETH is where the despair lives: holders are “ready to jump out the f*ing window” — Avi is getting calls from friends he onboarded in 2019 asking “what should I do with this crap?” Jonah himself sold all his ETH after Avi “convinced me slowly over the course of about six podcasts” — the ratio is down 50% against BTC since. “You literally sold me on it in a public forum.”

4. Bottoms form when sellers exhaust — so screen for who’s left to sell

• Avi’s mechanism, the episode’s most usable line: “assets tend to bottom not when buyers show up — assets tend to bottom when selling stops,” and top when there’s nobody left to buy. After the alt nuke’s liquidations and the 20% retrace that followed, “for the good assets that are fully unlocked, the sellers are kind of done.”
• The long side of that screen: avoid tokens where the team “never runs out of tokens” (Worldcoin, likely Aptos); own fully-unlocked assets with catalysts — likely Aave’s fee switch, and Avi’s “high-probability ETF basket” of LTC, SOL, XRP, DOGE.
• Jonah’s short side: pull up Dexscreener and check liquidity-to-FDV — a $100M FDV with $5k in the pool means the next seller annihilates it; he wants to automate the ratio into a screener for shorts. He’s large short WIF, small short SUI, sorted by his quadrant: “Bitcoin is a good project at a good price. Sui is a good project at a bad price. WIF is a bad project at a bad price… don’t invest in bad projects regardless of the price.”

5. Universal disbelief is fuel, not a warning

• The tweet Jonah reads out (from an account he cites as Root Tui): “one thing I hate about this cycle is that no one believes in anything — even most founders don’t believe in their own tokens.” His read: that’s not bearish — people complacent that crypto is “just a shitcoin casino” will sleep on the next alt move, and the stablecoin bill David Sacks says passes “in the next three months” lays foundations for legitimized, non-casino crypto.
• The bounce is already happening while nobody calls it: AI16Z +15–16%, Litecoin +11%, Fartcoin +33%, Venice from a 236 low tick to 853 — “approaching a 4x” in a week — Virtuals held its nuke, likely TAO has catalysts, and Pendle is shipping Boros (tokenizing funding rates, permissionless yield pools, expansion to likely Solana and Hyperliquid). Jonah adds likely Berachain “kind of looks like it’s bottomed” — disclosing again, to laughter, that he’s a locked investor who didn’t sell staking rewards or perps.
• Positioning completes the asymmetry: the funds and traders Avi talks to are “super super super super heavy in cash,” waiting for a go-ahead — “which makes me think the upside is a lot more asymmetric than the downside at this level.” On entries, Jonah has never successfully caught falling knives — “I try to catch the U-shaped recovery while it still looks like a J” — and Avi’s rejoinder is worth keeping: “easier to pick up a sideways knife… it’s just lying on the table.”

6. Trump is net bullish risk — except one 15% tail

• Avi’s four-part case: deregulation (which “stifled equities and crypto under Biden”), DOGE cutting wasteful spending is “massively bullish for productivity,” the trade-war jawboning “is posturing — a hard negotiating stance,” and a pro-business AI/crypto stance that gives Nvidia, Google, Microsoft “a golden path to deploying AI at scale” — and those companies are ~60% correlated with Bitcoin.
• The tail he says to monitor most closely: reports that Bessent is trying to convince Trump to change his success metric from a higher stock market to a lower 10-year yield. “If Trump shifts the goalposts… get out of everything — you could get ironed out by that freight train.” He puts the odds at ~15%; Bitcoin has “graduated” and performs regardless, but for altcoins “it’s going to be carnage.”
• Jonah’s pushback: Trump’s unpredictability itself, plus a scenario where DOGE mass firings raise unemployment and spook markets. Jonah’s rebuttal — with rates at 4%, any recession that foreseeable gets handled; “the Fed has plenty of tools left” — it would take something out of left field, like a Middle East war metastasizing into an oil shock with the SPR unrefilled. Avi concedes in real time: “as I’m making the argument with you, I kind of buy it a little bit less.”

7. The week’s map — and the calls to hold them to

• CPI Wednesday is the alt event: “for alts to do well in a sustained manner you need the Fed to be comfortable cutting — you need easy money back in the system.” For Bitcoin, Avi says: “it just doesn’t matter — this thing is probably going to end up higher in two months regardless.” His CPI decision tree, as spoken: “if it’s really bad then that’s good, if it’s medium bad then that’s bad, if it’s good then that’s bad or neutral.”
• Tariffs no longer move the tape because “what matters is the second derivative of the news — everyone f*ing knows there’s going to be tariffs”; the question is escalate or de-escalate, and Avi thinks “it’s going to get less bad — and the market agrees, which is why it’s not nuking on these headlines.” Expect chances to buy “a percent or two lower — 20% lower, I don’t know.”
• Jonah’s bias-check trick: compare now to when you were most long. He was long alts mid-December with BTC at 108 — “if I was that long then, how can I not be that long now?… if you were bullish on your favorite assets at any point in the last month and now you’re bearish, you’re probably making some sort of mistake.” (His counterweight credential: he called the second alt flush at ~2,900 ETH while his own AI agent argued bullish — ETH fell 13%. “Screw you, agent.”)
• The on-record call, to be checked next week: BTC dominance down. And the line that closes the case: “Cycles end when you run out of buyers, not when you have a bunch of depressed people on the sidelines. No way — this thing’s going to keep running.” Jonah, having “progressively talked myself into being more bullish throughout this whole podcast,” signs off ready to “go ape some stuff after we hang up.”