(Kitco News) - The sideways price action in the cryptocurrency market continued for another day on Tuesday as the vast majority of tokens in the top 200 traded within 3% of the previous day's price.
That was in stark contrast to gains seen in the traditional markets, which managed to charge higher for the second day in a row amid the release of several high-profile third-quarter earnings reports.
Data from TradingView shows that after running into resistance at $19,700, Bitcoin retraced back to support at $19,300 where bulls and bears are now battling it out for control of the price action.
BTC/USD 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
Neither group has emerged with a “deciding edge” according to Kitco senior technical analyst Wyckoff, which “suggests more of the same” sideways and choppy trading in the near term.
A forecast for pain
While some are applauding BTCs ability to maintain its price despite multiple economic headwinds in the wider world, others are having unpleasant flashbacks to 2018 when three months of sideways price action resulted in a price dump that decreased the value of Bitcoin by half.
$BTC weekly closed with a candle body less than $200 range
— Rager ?? (@Rager) October 17, 2022
Bitcoin moving sideways and compressing = boring
Last few weeks reminds me of September 2018 right before the market went violent and nuked
Chart below of 2018, oh the memories pic.twitter.com/Fgy52ygXKy
Insight into what level it may pull back to should another downturn occur was provided by Caleb Franzen, senior market analyst at Cubic Analytics, who posted the following tweet predicting a possible drawdown to the $15,300-$15,900 region.
At the very least, I expect #Bitcoin to retest the AVWAP from the 2015 lows, based on Coinbase trading volume.
— Caleb Franzen (@CalebFranzen) October 18, 2022
This AVWAP band is roughly priced at $15.3k-$15.9k.
The 2018 & 2020 lows both fell to this range, even dipping below it briefly. pic.twitter.com/X7vKrnxgBm
In a follow-up tweet that provided a read on how likely Franzen expects such a drop to occur, the analyst wrote, “I might just place a new limit order at $18.2k. For what it’s worth, each time I’ve tweeted about placing a limit order for BTC, it’s been filled within a week.”
Mixed day in the markets
From a macro perspective, it was a mixed day in the markets as stocks climbed higher while cryptos struggled to generate any momentum, resulting in a decoupling that wasn’t quite what crypto holders had in mind.
At the close of markets, the S&P, Dow and Nasdaq all finished the day in the positive with gains of 1.14%, 1.12% and 0.90%, respectively.
The altcoin market was largely a sea of red as the struggles for Bitcoin weighed heavily on prices.
Daily cryptocurrency market performance. Source: Coin360
As usual, there were several projects that managed to buck the overall trend to post double-digit gains, including a 24.83% increase for Conflux (CFX), a 16.81% gain for Ankr (ANKR), and a 13.9% increase for Ocean Protocol (OCEAN).
The overall cryptocurrency market cap now stands at $925 billion, and Bitcoin’s dominance rate is 39.8%.
