As it stands, I'm beginning to think this sideways near the top is a distribution phase before the market slow bleeds into a crash.
Given that you have experience with TA, you can certainly estimate much better what can happen in the market. However, I am a bit more optimistic, and I think that given all the circumstances, there will not be any drastic corrections.
Honestly, I'm not trying to predict. Years of trading has taught me that markets are quite unpredictable. I think more so in terms of
possibilities. Anyone who rules out the
possibility of a painful correction to the $13,000s or even the $11,000s is naive. It's something we need to be prepared for.
I like the way David (from the Godmode analysis thread) approaches this. Corrections are always inevitable, but there are two types of corrections: time corrections and price corrections. Time corrections are sideways without deep declines. Price corrections are deep and crash-like. It's impossible to know before the fact which one is coming.
The solution to the pandemic is now only a matter of time (months), the new US administration cannot be worse than the last (or maybe it can?), so some things may be normalized in terms of trade with China. Also, institutional money is constantly flowing into the BTC market, and halving has not yet shown its true effects.
Consequently, the conditions for a perfect storm (bull run) are becoming more likely in the next year or maybe a year later.
Don't get me wrong. I'm very bullish on BTC in the next year. I'm probably more bullish than almost anyone around here, given how few can even conceive of $500K or $1M valuations. I'm just talking about short term and mid term (weeks and months) corrections to the ongoing bull trend.
I've been expecting a correction back to $11k range ever since it went to high $15,000s. But then it only briefly dipped to $14.3k and surged to $19k. Consequently I entirely missed the $15k-$19k run because I had gone fully back into cash in my trading account in the $15000's, waiting for the correction back to $11k!
At $19k I figured it'd dip at least back to $13000s and the whole process of correction and recovery would take a couple months. But at this point I think I was wrong. Looks like this is a time correction, as price has been ranging mostly in $18k's and $19k's with a couple brief dips to $16k's and $17k's. A fall below $16k doesn't look likely anymore. It's been almost a month now since it first hit $18k and price is still holding. It may still dip down to $11k-$13k, but before I was 100% sure it would, now I think it is much more likely to never see those prices again and will instead surge over $20k soon and go a good bit higher so the next more substantial correction would probably only go down to $16k+ area and bounce up off that pretty quickly.
The more time price doesn't correct lower, the more time institutions have to buy up billions of dollars of bitcoin, making it harder and harder to get a deep correction - sucking up all the supply so that the price gets less and less likely to have any chance of correcting lower. I think too much supply has been sucked up by institutional investors these past ~26 days since BTC hit $18k so that a correction back to the last major support ($11k) is no longer even needed and support is actually $16k now. The market just looks like it leaped over previous support levels and won't even bother going back down to check in on them one last time.
On top of the normal hundreds of millions of dollars Grayscale buys up every week, MicroStrategy is likely going to be buying up ~$640 million BTC in the next couple weeks, since they completed their stock sale a few days ago. Just too much supply is being taken out of sellers hands and being put in long term holds by institutional players for us to see a solid correction from current price levels.