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.
Possible. Remember though, this is just one narrative. We don't know exactly what's happening behind the scenes. Plenty of institutions may be accumulating, but that doesn't mean they are determined to prop prices up.
Sometimes price hangs for weeks until it feels like it can't possibly fall.
And then it does. That's what maximum pain is all about: making everyone believe one direction is inevitable, before the market goes in the other. This traps lots of speculators and sets mid term trends into motion.
It's impossible to know whether this is an accumulation or distribution phase until the trading range is broken. Until then, we're all just guessing.
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.
What if, in the coming weeks, Grayscale's inflows dry up? Microstrategy is already out of cash and buying BTC on leverage, so demand from them is obviously not going to last long.