Following Bitcoin's bounce back these last few days after some sustained selling, there's plenty of failed breakdowns out there in the Crypto space right now.

Frequent readers of ours know just how much we love these setups:

In essence, when price undercuts its former lows, stop losses get hit, and longs throw in the towel. At the same time, bears heavily jump in and enter short.

Then as the market begins to rally back above those former lows, shorts are now underwater, and they're forced to cover. While they're buying back their positions to unwind the trade, longs see price on a tear higher and fold into buying back their old position. Momentum traders see these gains and jump on the bandwagon too, forcing even more shorts to cover.

In every major asset class, there are typically a handful of indices to help drive our decisions from the top-down.

Whether we're looking at the US Dollar Index, the CRB, the Nasdaq, or any other variety of ETFs, these help form the basis for identifying leaders, laggards, and assessing the overall market.

The same applies to Crypto.

The only problem is, there's a painful lack of diversified indices to look at in the first place; S&P Dow Jones indices launched a Mega-Cap Crypto index in May, which only tracks Ethereum and Bitcoin, and MSCI is currently eyeing launching indexes of their own.

This is the video recording of our June 18, 2021 All Star Charts Crypto Weekly Strategy Session.

It's sure been messy out there.

There just hasn't been too much to discuss in recent weeks - volatility's contracted, and any signs of momentum have just fizzled out.

But that's not to say that there are NO opportunities; it just simply means they're harder to come by, and the probabilities of success have lowered significantly.

Despite all this messy action, we've still had a handful of trades really go our way on both the long and short sides. Buying the leaders, and selling the laggards - despite how oversimplified it may sound - is as prudent of a strategy in this environment as any other.

This chart does a great job of boiling down how we're approaching this market:

These crazy Bitcoin "HODL'ers" and "Laser Eyes" people must be going nuts right now.

Apart from a few exceptions in shorter time frames, there's been a painful lack of real opportunities floating around in this space recently, both on the long and short sides.

Breakouts are failing, and breakdowns aren't doing much either.

Legendary trader Paul Tudor Jones once said that "Markets only trend about 15% of the time, the rest of the time they move sideways."

As aggressive as trends can be in Crypto, we need to respect that markets simply need to repair their damages and reload for the next move.

In the context of Bitcoin's 200-day moving average, once price slips below it, it tends to stay below for some time - especially after prolonged periods of it remaining above.

Altcoins are NOT leading this recent bounce.

If (and this is a big if) this is a tradable low for the Cryptocurrency space, this is a critical time and place for us to see new leadership emerge. So far, it's certainly not coming from down the cap scale.

We shared this chart in one of last week's notes, mentioning that:

Throughout Bitcoin’s rebound in the previous few days, the leadership has not been in the Altcoins.

Apart from a few exceptions, most Altcoins have been flat since Bitcoin’s recovered from its crash lows.

Nearly a week since and the same still holds true:

This is the video recording of our June 11, 2021 All Star Charts Crypto Weekly Strategy Session.

Though consolidation periods can be painful, they allow us to evaluate the next leaders and laggards when a directional trend resumes.

We've written a fair amount about potential leaders in the last few weeks, but it may be time to increasingly shift the conversation and focus more on the laggards.

While most areas have bounced this week, the DeFi sector is stubbornly lagging:

No matter how many charts we analyze, the market ultimately gets the final word, not us.

We're simply here to position ourselves where the risk vs. reward is exponentially in our favor. Unfortunately for trend-followers, there's not a whole lot of opportunities floating around right now.

Until we get a move in either direction from this near-term range, longs are likely getting chopped up, and shorts probably aren't working either.

As we've mentioned repeatedly, 30k is the level to watch on the downside for Bitcoin, while 41,000 and eventually 48,000 is the upper level of this range.

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