Clarity Act Progress Boosts Bitcoin | Trading the Markets w/ Kris Bullock

Core view: Kris Bullock is skeptical the current Bitcoin rally — helped along by rising odds of Clarity Act passage — turns into a sustained bull market. Technicals look constructive (price reclaiming a lost range, D-mark count low at 3, weekly megatrend signal close to flipping, momentum "red dots" fading, Atreides flipped green), but he says the move up to the 20-week or 200-day moving average is more likely to get rejected than to run.

Mechanism — who's buying, and who isn't: Bullock's framework rests on identifying the marginal buyer. Institutions, the dominant marginal buyer over the last year via ETFs, have been net sellers: flows are negative roughly $5.5B year-to-date, with the last three weeks only barely positive after several negative weeks. US retail, which he proxies with the Coinbase premium index (price on Coinbase vs. global average), is also absent — the premium is currently negative, meaning no strong US retail bid. Absent both buyer bases, he attributes the rally to money already inside crypto rotating out of stablecoins, which he says historically cannot sustain a multi-month uptrend on its own — it has to be "money coming out of stables probably from people that had parked money in stables" a few weeks or months back, not new capital from outside crypto.

What has to be true for the bull case: Bullock ties Bitcoin's fate to a four-part financial-conditions index (real yields, credit spreads, the dollar index, equity volatility). He wants: the DXY down meaningfully, ideally back under the 100 threshold; global M2 to resume and set higher highs in its uptrend (it's been sideways since April); real yields (currently 1.83%–2.9% across the curve) to drop, which would happen either via a rate cut or continued disinflation; and, ideally, an actual rate cut, though he doesn't expect one imminently. He notes real yields have been in an unfavorable, restrictive regime continuously since 2023 — never dipping back into the