Bitcoin traded near $86,100 on Monday, still short of its $87,354 swing high, after its daily chart flashed a second, stronger golden cross. The signal followed a weak September jobs report that cut the odds of an October Fed rate hike.
Bitcoin traded around $86,100 on Monday morning, up 1.14% in 24 hours, giving the asset a $1.73 trillion market cap. It still sits roughly $1,200 below the $87,354 swing high that has capped the rally.
Momentum, however, keeps building. The Relative Strength Index sits at 64.7, hot but not yet in overbought territory above 70, while the Average Directional Index, which measures trend strength, reads 43.4 — well above the 25 level that marks a strong trend.
A second, harder-to-fake golden cross
A golden cross forms when a faster exponential moving average, or EMA, climbs above a slower one. Bitcoin's 50-day EMA crossed above its 200-day EMA in mid-September, coinciding with the asset's second-best September performance on record. Now a second, more demanding signal has appeared: the 100-day EMA has also crossed above the 200-day EMA.
That cross is harder to fake, because pulling the slower 100-day average above the 200-day line requires price to stay elevated for months, not just bounce for a few weeks. Together, the two crosses show the short-term and medium-term trends both sitting above the long-term one. Still, EMAs lag price, so the signal confirms a move that already happened rather than predicting the next one.
A weak jobs report reshuffled Fed odds
The spark was Friday's jobs report. Employers added just 29,000 positions in September, roughly a third of what economists expected, and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2%. Revisions made it worse: July was cut from a gain of 21,000 jobs to a loss of 10,000, and August was lowered from 162,000 to 133,000. Annual wage growth cooled to 3.0%.
The Federal Reserve raised rates a quarter point to 3.75%-4.00% on September 16 in a unanimous vote. A week before Friday's report, bond traders gave an October rate hike a 64% chance; after it, those odds fell to roughly 16%-22%. It is the mirror image of September 4, when a blowout August jobs report sent Bitcoin sliding more than 2% to near $79,300 — a level Bitcoin now trades about 8% above.
Traders eye $87,500 and beyond
On the prediction market Myriad, traders are leaning bullish for October: an $87,500 touch trades at 80%, a move to $90,000 at 59%, $95,000 at 25%, and $100,000 at 12%. The calendar ahead is thin but loaded — the Fed releases its September meeting minutes on Wednesday, October 7, and the BLS publishes September CPI on October 14, ahead of the Fed's next policy meeting on October 27-28.
Source: Decrypt
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