Ivan on Tech analyzes Bitcoin and markets on US midterm election day
Ivan on Tech presents a solo market analysis stream covering Bitcoin's price action, midterm election impacts, and broader macro conditions.
Ivan on Tech analyzes Bitcoin and markets on US midterm election day
Ivan on Tech presents a solo market analysis stream covering Bitcoin's price action, midterm election impacts, and broader macro conditions.
Summary
Ivan on Tech delivers a live market update on a US midterm election day, with Bitcoin trading around $76,800 after five consecutive bearish weeks. He argues that despite short-term volatility, the long-term bull market thesis remains intact, citing historical data showing Bitcoin up 24%, almost 45%, and 92% in the 12 months following the 2014, 2018, and 2022 midterm elections respectively. He also covers the NASDAQ entering a bear trend while the S&P 500 holds bullish, oil prices dropping sharply, ongoing geopolitical uncertainty around Iran, and the controversy surrounding the Abstract chain and its failure to deliver a promised airdrop to users who farmed XP. He closes with commentary on Ethereum's economic model being undermined by L2s, and the broader business cycle implications of high energy prices and interest rates. The episode also features a guest discussing the sharp rise in daily cybersecurity hacks across countries and exchanges, and Ivan provides a technical analysis update on XRP.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin price and market overview
Ivan on Tech: Welcome to another episode. As you can see right now, Bitcoin is currently at $76,800. We now have quite a few bearish weeks — one, two, three, four, five bearish weeks in a row. The trend still remains bullish.
And today, as you know if you are not living under a rock, we have the midterms. They are happening today. You have the schedule right here — the closing times of the different states. Parts of Indiana and Kentucky are closing first, then you have Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and so on. Let us know in the chat if you are from the US and whether you are going to vote.
Historical post-midterm performance for stocks and crypto
The number one thing the whole world is focusing on right now is the midterms, because normally after midterms, no matter the result, the stock market does fantastic. Since 1950, the S&P 500 has finished higher in the 12 months after every single midterm election. After every single one. So midterms are bullish. After midterms, the S&P pumps. Why? Because you have clarity. You have certainty. When there is uncertainty, the market doesn't like it. That's why in a midterm year you normally have a bit of weakness before the elections. Once the election is finished — good. We have the result. We know who is in charge and who is not.
Another interesting thing we discussed yesterday in the Bulmania private livestream is that normally after midterms, power is shared. You have more sharing of power, and it's less likely that one party controls everything — which is something markets normally love, because politicians can do dumb things. They can increase taxes. They can go to war. They can do all kinds of stuff. Tariffs are a tax that gets increased. So when you have sharing of power, even if it is Elizabeth Warren getting a bit more power, markets love that. Markets love stability. The fog lifts and you have clarity about what's going to happen, and markets adore clarity.
In terms of crypto, the question is: the stock market is fantastic after midterms — is crypto also fantastic after midterms? If we look at crypto after midterms, you have insane performance. In the 12 months after election day, Bitcoin was up 24% in 2014, up almost 45% in 2018, and a whopping 92% in 2022. Very important.
Now, short-term there is a bit of volatility here and there. It can be quite brutal — a sharp early drop in the first month, a milder post-vote dip. So if you are looking at the short term — what's going to happen today, tomorrow — maybe some volatility. Who cares? If you look 12 months ahead, it's fantastic.
And as you know, when we are trading on the weekly time frame, which we do here, when we follow the bull and bear markets, we care about the long term. For example, when we went bullish in 2023, it took all the way to Q4 2025 before we turned bearish. There was all kinds of volatility back and forth. If you are a day trader, good for you. If you are here for the bull market, then the strategy of buying at or below the 200 Moving Average and starting to deploy there is very, very good. And once you have the bull trend confirmed, it's even better risk-reward.
So all in all, we follow the strategy. We have a grand strategy — we're working on the big picture — and our grand strategy is bullish. It's bull market. We've had a year of the bear. After a year of the bear comes the bull market. And in a bull market, we're bullish.
As always, you should pause and read the disclaimer. Really understand it. Crypto and trading are high risk. Nothing is financial advice. What I do may or may not work for you. Maybe you have a different mindset. I don't know your condition. You can lose everything, as in any market.
ETF flows and current market conditions
In terms of the ETF, we do have quite a bit of outflow right before the midterm — $400 million leaving the ETF. Currently the ETF is basically net zero. You have a bit of inflow, a bit of outflow. Looking at the past weeks, it's around net zero. No mega bull, no mega bear — just trying to figure out what's going to happen. The markets are uncertain before the midterm, and that's reflected in how the ETF is performing in terms of inflow and outflow.
If we look at the overall market: Bitcoin is minus 1.3%, ETH is minus 0.9%. Tether is still pegged — hallelujah, still pegged. No Tether FUD. Each and every bull market there's some kind of Tether FUD, but it's been a long time since we had any. Binance is a bit up, a bit down. Everything is kind of flat.
Looking at the biggest gainers, there are some very small pump-and-dumps, but nothing too spectacular in the top 100. The established coins haven't really moved. In the dump department, it's mainly the small ones that are dumping. Zcash is down about 7%. You have Ocean Protocol — it was big back in the day, but this is what happens once you go into a bear market. There's no guarantee you're going to come back. Dusk, Waves — remember Waves from 2017? It was one of those established ones. You had ETH, then you had ETH from Korea which was Icon, ETH from China which was Neo, and Waves was kind of ETH from Russia. Monad is down a bit. Everything is down between five and ten percent.
NASDAQ bear trend and tech sector weakness
The stock market is very similar. The tech sector is not really doing well. The AI trade for now is unwinding — for us the AI trade ended already during the summer, but the NASDAQ is only now going into a bear trend. The reason it is so brutally down is that tech stocks are not doing well. They're doing very, very poor. A lot of these tech stocks are literally collapsing in front of our eyes. So NASDAQ is bear. We need to be careful.
You still have the S&P being bull. So if you're bullish on the stock market, the S&P is still bull. But NASDAQ — we have to be careful. It became a bear trend already.
Another thing that is in a bear trend is Solana. We said yesterday, be careful — it's a bear trend and this thing keeps falling. When something is in a bear trend, we are not interested. We're interested in bull trends. When something is in a bear trend, it's better to reallocate according to strategy into bullish assets.
Litecoin is the perfect example. During the last few months where it went bear trend, what did we do? We said Hype is better because Hype is still bullish. They literally do the same thing, and it was a way better choice. The same thing now with Zcash — Zcash is bear trend, Monero is bull trend. So when Zcash goes bear, it's better to be in Monero. You're still in crypto. You're still not in cash.
There's nothing wrong with being in cash by the way. Sometimes cash is really king. Sometimes most assets go down — like in the current environment, many assets are down including gold. Gold is collapsing. Stocks are more or less collapsing, except the S&P 500 is still holding on. So in this case, when you have Zcash bear and Monero bull trend, of course it's better to be in Monero. Simple as that. We don't discriminate. We are very upfront. If it's a bear trend, we cannot risk it. Even if I love the coin — I love the coin, but I love the portfolio more. If you have bull trend, fantastic. If it's bear trend, we cannot risk it.
Macro outlook: midterms, Tom Lee, and oil
That's a short rundown of the recent events, recent flips, and the midterms. The conclusion is: we are remaining bullish on the bull market, remaining bullish on the big picture. Not too much has changed, and we are now in the same boat as Tom Lee. As you remember, we were against Tom Lee until Bitcoin went to the 200 Moving Average and went up from below it. Since then, Tom Lee and I are on the same page fully. Tom Lee is saying markets are going to exit the year strong, and there is a good chance of that. Just looking historically, the S&P 500 is normally fantastic.
It's interesting because the S&P 500 gets most of its gains in the first few months after the midterms. Six months after midterms, the average is around plus 14%. The total for 12 months following midterms is 15%. So basically 90% of the gains come within the first six months after the midterm.
We keep it simple. Bull trend is still in the S&P — we're bullish S&P. NASDAQ we're careful. Better to be in S&P now than NASDAQ. Tech is not really doing too well the last few weeks. The S&P has basically been held up by tech stocks, while all the other components have been doing very poorly. Most S&P companies have been in a bear market for the past year, but we don't notice that because tech has been pumping so much. Maybe they're just going to switch roles now, because a lot of these companies are finding a bottom. Could be that they switch roles and cancel each other out — that's the benefit of the diversification within the S&P.
If the S&P goes bear trend, we'll need to be risk-off there also. For now it's bullish, and after midterms it's normally bullish. We follow the trend. Should it go bull again in the future, good.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon says demand for AI deals remains very robust, with a tech super cycle set to dominate capital markets. You see how quickly everything can change. One big fat green candle and everything is back. Suddenly AI works again. Suddenly everyone's excited.
And you have now the first bullish macro change in quite some time — oil is dumping. Oil is taking a sharp hit. WTI is trading below $100. That's good. A five to seven percent drop in a day looking at the different benchmarks for oil. Hopefully this continues. This, together with the midterms — if oil also dumps, fantastic.
Iran geopolitical situation
It also wouldn't surprise me if there's some kind of deal with Iran. You know how many times Trump takes it to the last step and then says, "They're great guys, we made a deal." Let's see if it's the same here. Trump says he's not considering striking Iran. The US military has launched limited defensive strikes. CIA Director John Ratcliffe is advising Trump to maintain the no-war, no-deal status quo. It changes every 15 minutes.
Oil is currently still in a fall. Hopefully it can continue towards the bear flip. Everything can change fast. Don't get too funneled into a bearish rabbit hole, and don't get funneled too much into the bullish rabbit hole either. Stay objective. How do we stay objective? We look at the price. The price is the most objective thing I know in the world. There is nothing more objective than the price.
Stream briefing summary
Looking at the briefing for today's stream: NASDAQ is down 10% from its peak. Bitcoin is down a similar amount — both are around 10% from their last peak. War risk is back. US midterms are today. Binance recovery phase — it seems they got the money back and withdrawals are open. Bitcoin is under $77K and over $100 million in longs were liquidated in an hour. Be careful with leverage.
Fear and greed just hit "fear." When you want to buy when it is fear, especially within a bull trend — when there is fear within a bull trend, normally it is good risk-reward.
The common thread is a positioning shakeout around a dated event risk, not a break in fundamentals. Earnings beat — most companies did report good earnings. The economy is strong. Crypto balance sheets are adding while prices slip. Election day and Iran headlines decide the next leg.
Strategy bought a bit of Bitcoin, but they still have to prop up their Strife economics. They spent too much on Strife and not enough on buying Bitcoin. Some good news: the SEC dropped its lawsuit against Coinbase. The SEC also released new guidance clarifying securities laws.
Cybersecurity hacks and Vitalik Buterin's response
There are many hacks happening now. A guest voice in the stream comments on the situation:
Guest: I think it's no secret that anybody who's been paying attention on Twitter has seen hacks being reported on a daily cadence, especially if you're a regular retail user. But if you're an engineer or a technical person, you're seeing way more than that, because generally speaking, engineers have specific channels they watch — a new vulnerability was found, whatever. You'd get these things once a week depending on severity, once a month. But now you're seeing like 20 a day. And it's everything. Just this morning I woke up, logged on, and the first thing I saw is Belgium, Sweden, France, Luxembourg, Finland, and like five other countries getting their fridges hacked, and some of them are blowing up entirely. That's on top of the Binance hack. And then I just logged on a few minutes ago and saw Mercado hacked, and then some other European exchange hacked.
Ivan on Tech: Crazy world, guys. Lock down all your infrastructure. Be skeptical. If you hear some link, be very skeptical.
Now Vitalik came out and proposed a bit of a solution to the hacking. He loves dressing up. But since he started to dress up, ETH kind of never pumped again. You remember badger, badger, badger — that was like the peak of ETH before Vitalik started dressing up in ridiculous costumes. ETH was pumping. Then he starts dressing up as a badger or something. Now he's in some character costume. I'm becoming too old for this. The chart is in the toilet and this guy is still joking around. Where's the suit?
And then people ask why they trust the private banker more than Vitalik — because the S&P pumps more. NASDAQ has pumped way more. Everything the private banker recommended has pumped way more than ETH. If your thing pumps a lot, you have permission to dress like this. But ETH has done very poorly against everything.
Anyway, he's speaking about security. Let's see what he says.
Vitalik Buterin: "The classic problem with any kind of security is basically who do you trust. And the solution here is openness and verifiability. If you want a path for us to be able to survive and prosper in this new environment — a path that does not depend on handing over the keys to everyone's castle to one small group of people — then if you want something that simultaneously respects local self-sovereignty and also enables cooperation, then you want open source. You want innovations that are made in one place to be usable and improvable in other places. You want verifiability. You want to be able to use mathematical tools to actually verify security properties of at least digital components."
Ivan on Tech: I thought he was going to say ETH is the answer, but he says we need to figure it out. Okay. To be fair to Vitalik, the costume is cool — he looks like he's from Star Wars. Not a bad costume. But his costume correlated with the price. It was better when he did not have a costume and when ETH was being used.
Ethereum's L2 fee capture problem
There was a tweet I saw the other day from a Near guy who had a breakdown. Look here: at a $10,000 swap on Phantom, who gets paid? The Phantom wallet takes most. Uniswap — the protocol takes $5. ETH gets 10 cents. But this is if it happens on ETH. If it happens on an L2, then the L2 takes another few dollars and ETH is last. This is the problem with ETH. L2s are robbing it even more. Already now you see the economics where the apps capture most of it, but L2s flip the table even more — the L2 maybe gets a decent cut and ETH gets one millicent. What is this?
Wealth inequality commentary
There's a bit of political content in my feed. Someone is saying:
Speaker: "For one of our own residents to become the world's first trillionaire while one in five Texas children live in poverty — to me that is a spiritual sickness. I want people to be successful. I'm proud of Tesla. I'm proud of the great businesses across the state of Texas, across this country. When businesses are successful, people are successful, and I'm all for that. But to accumulate more wealth than you could possibly spend in 100 lifetimes while we have people starving in this one — to me that means we're not fulfilling our obligations."
Ivan on Tech: So you take Tesla shares or what? You know, when SpaceX went from $220 to $100 — you guys remember that? When SpaceX launched and everyone said, "Oh, Elon is a trillionaire." And then SpaceX dumped from $200 to $100. Elon lost like a trillion dollars there within a few months, and world hunger still did not get solved. He stopped being a trillionaire — and still, what is this?
Elon, as far as I know, doesn't even own a house. He's all about building his companies. Let's say you build a company worth two trillion. What should you do? Give it to the state so the state can feed someone? You give it to the state, they feed themselves. The bureaucrat feeds himself. Having heritage from the Soviet Union, I can tell you unfortunately redistribution is not as good as it seems. The bureaucrat takes everything. If you're friends with a bureaucrat, maybe you get something also. The average person gets nothing.
We're apolitical, guys. I'm just thinking — imagine you are Elon Musk. You've built a business worth two trillion. What they want you to do is give away shares, but that's ownership. You give away ownership to a bureaucrat, and ownership means decision-making power. Now the bureaucrat is going to make decisions about how SpaceX should be run. The current system with high taxes in California is probably quite good. But if you live in a country where young people want socialism, you've got to be careful.
Pudgy Penguins and Abstract chain airdrop controversy
Pudgy Penguins — no more Abstract. They can focus on the penguin finally. They have some new announcement. Basically you can get Vibes — it's a digital and physical trading card game. Something's happening for the penguins. Finally.
There is still community fallout from Abstract. If you spent money farming Abstract and didn't get the coin, I understand you're upset. But either you move on, or you do something against Luca. Right now you guys are just crying on Twitter. If there's a real case, organize and do the case.
Someone is trying to sue Luca because he said they were planning to do an airdrop, and then people farmed and farmed and farmed and there was no airdrop. Can you sue the founder of the chain for that? Maybe. I think it would be the first one in crypto. If a founder has promised an airdrop and then there was no airdrop — can you sue for the transaction fees or something? Interesting to consider.
But in general, in our community, we always said we don't farm. I don't like farming. What is farming? You do transactions to inflate the metrics of the chain. Fake interactions on chain. Who is that helping? It's not helping the chain really, because with fake transactions and fake metrics, you cannot grow the project properly.
It's like when I started YouTube — people asked, "Ivan, did you buy followers in the beginning?" Absolutely not. I wanted a real community. If you buy followers or views, all your metrics are garbage. You don't know what works and what doesn't. We would not have our community if from the beginning I had taken the advice to bootstrap by buying engagement. I wanted to know: do people care about the things I say or not? If you don't care, I do something else. The signal is the most valuable thing in analytics.
If you do farming, you destroy the metric for the chain. It may look good, but it's fake. It's not good for the chain, and it's not good for you — because the chain can say, "Hey, we don't do airdrop," which is very normal. Airdrop today, no airdrop tomorrow. And you waste your human potential doing a dumb thing. I understand people want to make money, but farming is dumb. You move money around like a bot. Why would you want to spend your time doing that?
Someone wrote a big letter to Walmart requesting the permanent removal of Pudgy Penguin from Walmart, addressed to the ethics and compliance team. His concerns are based on his experience with Abstract. He says he spent $30,000 farming XP. Do you think the person at Walmart ethics and compliance is going to care that this guy used the Abstract chain and farmed millions of XP? If I am Walmart ethics and compliance, I'm like — what? You did what?
If you bought an NFT and they told you specifically that you'd get a coin from it, and there were specifics like that, then okay, I understand. But writing to Walmart to remove the plushy from the store because you farmed XP — that's not serious. If there is really a case, there is a case. Otherwise, what is this? If you really think you got scammed, do a lawsuit. Don't write to Walmart ethics.
The Pudgy Penguins are moving on somewhere else and all focus is now on the penguin. The price is still in heavy consolidation. Abstract is gone anyway. It's gone.
XRP technical analysis
Still bullish on XRP? Let's see. Technically still bull trend, but it's quite far down. Normally what happens when you have a bull trend like this and it goes down, stop losses get hit. In this case, I would not touch it until it goes back above the recent high. If you love XRP — technically still bullish — but normally when you have a coin that goes to $1.50 and then drops like this, according to mechanical rules which we teach in Bulmania, in most cases your stop loss would already be hit. Then you can choose to re-enter. There are different re-entries you could do — one of them is if we go above the previous high for continuation. This has happened quite a lot lately during the last months, where coins pump, go bullish, and then consolidate. It's a real possibility, but that's why we have risk management and stop losses. Maximum a few percent of the portfolio is at risk at any time, and then you can retry when it goes into either a new high or a new bull run.
Dollar strength, war risk, and the business cycle
The best post-war trade: if the war comes down, you will have a move out of the dollar. On the forex side, probably other non-USD currencies are going to get a bit of strength against the dollar, because when there is uncertainty, people run to the dollar. That's why the dollar is quite strong.
Look at the DXY — the dollar index against other currencies has been in a bull trend basically since the Iran war started, somewhere around February or March. That uptrend has sustained. Should the war end, the DXY is likely going to go down. Oil is likely to go down. Crypto is likely to go up. Should the DXY go down and oil go down, likely crypto goes up.
Crypto right now is not working as a hedge. But gold is also not working as a hedge. Gold is also not pumping. Since the war started, gold has actually been dumping. Only the dollar is the real hedge — the safe haven. It's not in line with the overall narrative that gold or Bitcoin is the safe haven. Short-term, in times of worry, the dollar is the safe haven. It's true.
In this environment, the best thing — especially as emotions heat up and you have anxiety — is basically Treasuries, the dollar. Should the war end, you're going to have the dollar go down, oil go down, and crypto and risk assets up. If oil goes down, they can finally decrease the rate and basically continue with the normal business cycle, which currently — because energy prices are so high — needs to be kept in this high interest rate environment.
It's a super interesting environment we're in right now, because the average business is cooked. That's what we said when we talked about the S&P equal weight — the companies not related to AI are already cooked. So much so that maybe they're already bottoming out and can start building a new bull trend. AI is the thing that is propping up everything now. That's why the S&P is still around all-time highs.
Look at the S&P equal weight — this is not weighted by market cap. It gives all 500 companies an equal part of the index. The normal S&P is weighted by market cap, so higher market cap companies get more influence. Tech in the normal S&P has a crazy weight — I think it's like 40% of the S&P is just five big tech companies. But the equal weight S&P shows that we've been dumping since August and kind of bottomed out in October, and now we're going up because all the normal businesses have been mega wrecked. Maybe they're even bottoming out a bit. That's where the S&P is still holding up quite okay — AI is dumping but everything else is kind of going up — while NASDAQ is mainly tech and has nothing to balance it out.
The business cycle is such that as we go from high interest rates to low interest rates, all of the business activity and access to capital — which is very expensive now — should become cheaper. Business activity should go up. Risk assets should go up, because when interest rates go down, you need to be taking risk in order to get any kind of yield. That's the natural next step in the business cycle, which should unlock once energy prices go down. That's the bullish view after the war ends.