The digital asset markets have been in a state of great turmoil lately, labeled as “extreme fear” in the fear and greed index. Bitcoin of course leading the charge. I know many of you are new to this asset and what’s happening right now likely seems beyond frightening. You’ve likely never owned an asset that saw a 50% drawdown and feel as though you made a horrible decision. You haven’t, this is normal and actually far less violent than bear cycles I’ve been in years prior where 75-80% drawdowns were the norm.

Let’s discuss the title of this thread, the Big Print. Here it is:

This single transaction sent Bitcoin plummeting downward

So what is the dark pool, aka ‘block trades?’ This is where financial institutions place large buy or sell orders through third party intermediaries so as not to land on the order book you and I use when trading an equity or derivative. They stay hidden from the general market so as not to spook retail investors. But with certain software you can view these prints and depending on their size, trade them. By doing so, you’re trading WITH Wall Street and basically copy trading whatever it is they’re doing. What do you think your win ratio is by doing this?

The caveat of course is that you don’t know whether these are a buy or sell transaction, so you have to watch and pay attention to the price action for an indicator. Normally it’s not instantaneous, but on May 26th around 10:30am, it absolutely was.

See below:

Massive sell volume from those 29M shares at 10:30am which would continue trending downward into June

I’m a very active trader, comes with the territory, so when I saw this I immediately put on protection in the form of ‘put debit spreads’ for what was going to be a 100% verified downtrend. One of the great things about bitcoin is it’s volatility. If you know how to take advantage of it, you can profit from it’s movements whether up, down, or sideways. But that typically requires patience and not having to punch a clock for income which is a no-go for most folks out there. Totally understandable.

With bitcoin, we typically have 3 good years and 1 bad one (2026). You can hold it and do nothing and be absolutely fine. When it pumps you can use it as a down payment on real estate here in the US now. Or you can sell some and move it into income generating ETF’s in trad-fi. Or you can stake stable coins in places like coinbase, earn 3.5% APY and use those rewards to essentially buy bitcoin for free. Or again, you can do nothing and hold it into the future and make out like a bandit.

But I know regular people just trying to get ahead don’t want to hear that right now, so let me ask you something. Do you honestly believe that Wall Street and institutions like BlackRock, Fidelity, VanEck, ARK investments, GreyScale, Invesco, BitWise, Wisdom Tree, Franklin, and most recently Morgan Stanley would all file for these financial vehicles if bitcoin was a dead end ponzi scheme? Of course not. BlackRock and Morgan Stanley alone control over $20 Trillion in assets under management.

Morgan Stanley of particular note is quite profound because they didn’t just create a spot bitcoin ETF, they also created a charter bank to custody their own client’s bitcoin allocations under their own name. MS has decades of financial relationships, endowment managers, and sovereign wealth funds. They also have 16,000 advisors who will soon be incentivized to move clients into their new $MSBT product which is also offering the lowest management fee in the space of only 0.14%. This institution will also be launching it’s own spot crypto trading on the E-trade brokerage platform which it also owns, which will add Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana trading.

All of these financial behemoths spend millions in research, hiring personnel, and leveraging AI to painstakingly investigate if something is worth creating a market for. Morgan didn’t just create a market for bitcoin, it’s building an entire financial infrastructure around it and using it’s capital to move people into what they believe will be the future. It should go without saying that they wouldn’t simply just gamble their reputation on something that’s nothing more than a wild gamble. They will however spend billions on building something that they know is a sure thing and will continue paying them decades into the future. This is where we are.

Markets are extremely psychological. I have watched financial news stations and seen in real time the broadcasters telling the audience how great a particular stock is, while seeing Wall Street unload their shares on the dark pool after retail starts pumping their bags. If you’re following the news about something, you’re already too late. Money is made when you follow the whales and financial behemoths into a trade, let the media create your profits, and then exit.

If you can’t do that, buying and holding bitcoin for years and passing it onto your next of kin is still the greatest asymmetric bet the regular guy has on a future. Just for comparison, I started buying bitcoin at what I thought was the expensive price of $3500 a decade ago. People called me every name in the book, and I’ve been through numerous bull and bear cycles, and the thesis hasn’t changed. Bitcoin is the only finite asset in existence capped at 21M coins with no CEO and a totally transparent network backed by the most secure network protocols we have. The day quantum computing threatens that, we’ll upgrade those protocols but the banks and old world financial infrastructure will have to do it far before we ever will.

So rest easy. What’s happening right now is typical of a bear cycle and also extremely typical of Wall Street trying to scare people out of their positions to get generational entry into this asset. We’re also seeing a major liquidation in various market indexes at the moment (the S&P fell over 30 points Friday and much of the Nasdaq) for what I think is likely a capital pivot to take advantage of Elon Musk’s Space X IPO along with allocating further into AI investment. As I’m writing this, Korean markets were recently halted by circuit breakers in the hopes of preventing a crash much like how ours function in the states.

Long story short, if you hold bitcoin in cold storage like how I teach you to do hear at the Foundry, nobody has access to those except you. Wall Street cannot sell them on your behalf because you control the keys. You’re keeping them out of their reach, taking them out of circulation, and forging generational wealth for your progeny into the future. Time always does the heavy lifting here. We’re going to see much more market chaos this summer, bitcoin is always the canary in the coal mine before everything erupts elsewhere.

Stack in silence, build your legacy.

The Big Print (Dark Pool Variety)

Retail is gone, but not Really…