Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, November 19th, and today we are desperately asking, is the Bitcoin bottom in? Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly.ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, price action is gloomy,

but Bitcoin saw a slight bounce on Tuesday, leading some to ask if the bottom might just might be in.

After trading below $90,000 on Monday night, Bitcoin staged a relatively mild recovery during

Tuesday's trading session. The price reached a high of almost 94,000 but quickly rolled over.

The $90,000 level was tested again overnight and heading into Wednesday it was around $90,000.

Not hugely confidence-inspiring, but at least Bitcoin found some support instead of crashing

through another key level. Demand is still looking very weak. The Coinbase premium is currently

negative, which usually indicates that

U.S. institutions aren't in the market. ETF flows are telling the same story, with another

$370 million worth of outflows yesterday to make it five days in a row. Bitcoin futures markets

just flipped into backwardation for the first time since March, meaning the December price

for Bitcoin is now below the spot price. Sentiment remains at a low with the Fear and Greed Index jammed at extreme fear. Never one to miss an opportunity, Bloomberg called this the Great Bitcoin Crash of 2025, writing, once promoted as a high growth play, an inflation hedge and a portfolio diversifier, the world's largest cryptocurrency now faces the prospect of ending the year in the red, without fulfilling any of those roles. For those who've seen a few cycles, this is nothing new, and many are still calling this a correction rather than the end of the cycle. Raul Paul of Real Vision wrote, I wanted to put the current sell off in perspective. Bitcoin corrected 32% in 2024, 32% earlier this year, and right now is around 28%. This is normal, you've lived it before. Technicals are flamboyantly oversold. Sentiment is in the toilet too, worst I've seen at this cycle. Vijay Boyapati commented, is this the start of a Bitcoin bear market? Certainly possible, but it's also important to remember that this correction is still down in the normal range for bull market corrections, about a 30% drawdown. When everyone in their dog is dancing on the grave of Bitcoin, don't join them. Tom Lee went on CNBC and commented that the flash crash and Fed rate cuts being taken off the table are weighing on markets. He said, I think that's all creating this downside pressure. But I think the good news is that there are signs of exhaustion. I did speak with Tom DeMar of DeMaric, and he thinks there are signs that would

look like a bottom that could be occurring sometime this week. BitWise CIO Matt Hogan commented

that his base case is that Bitcoin is near the bottom, but he added, the other theory is

Bitcoin is a leading indicator and the whole market is nuked. We're not really seeing the

full-throated bottom calls that you might expect to see after a painful crash, but some investors are starting to make quiet moves. Whale selling was blamed by many for triggering the sell-off, but the numbers have actually reversed. Bitcoin whales have been net buyers for the last week of October, and the number of wallets holding a thousand Bitcoin or more is at four-month highs. Tracy Schuchart, the senior economist for Ninja Trader,

put out a comprehensive analysis of the drawdown that went viral on Twitter. Her key point

was that Bitcoin ran up from 40,000 to 126,000 on the narrative of institutional adoption

plus Fed easing. Traders also levered up on the basis of a prolonged bull run. Once the Fed

began unwinding expectations of further rate

...