(Kitco News) – It was a volatile start to the trading week in the cryptocurrency market as Monday saw Bitcoin’s (BTC) price whipsaw 2.55% as meme stock mania returned to the equities market.
After trading near support at $69,000 through most of the morning session, Bitcoin saw its price surge to a daily high of $70,300 near 10 am EST, only to reverse course and sink to a low of $68,550 over the next hour.
BTC/USD Chart by TradingView
Bulls have since bid it back above $69,000, and at the time of writing, King Crypto trades at $69,208, an increase of 1.8% on the 24-hour chart.
While the crypto market is starting to show signs of life, the story dominating headlines on Monday is a surge in the price of GameStop (GME) stock, which spiked over 100% at one point in early trading after a Reddit post allegedly from Keith Gill – aka “Roaring Kitty” – showed that the influential trader has placed a big bet on the popular meme stock.
“GameStop stock, $GME, soars over 80% after ‘Roaring Kitty’ announces that he has bought $65 million of call options and $116 million of stock,” tweeted The Kobeissi Letter. “‘Roaring Kitty’ is currently up over $300 million on this $GME position. The stock has now added $5 BILLION of market cap today alone. He could become a billionaire this week.”
The gains for GME stock, which was briefly halted for volatility, declined to 50% shortly after the opening bell. At the time of writing, GME is up 29.35% on the session and trades at $30.06.
“Are we set for another twist in the GameStop saga?” questioned Neil Roarty, analyst at Stocklytics. “The rise of the original ‘meme stock’ shocked the world back in 2021, when a company that had long been written off soared in valuation as a Reddit community of retail investors kept buying - for reasons Wall Street struggled to fathom.”
“The movement’s figurehead, Keith ‘Roaring Kitty’ Gill, has since been the subject of a Hollywood movie starring Paul Dano and Seth Rogan,” Roarty noted. “Over the weekend Roaring Kitty made a sensational return, claiming to be holding more than $180 million worth of GameStop (GME) stock and call options.
“That sent GME’s pre-opening price to more than $40 a share, almost double its Friday close and quadruple the $10 it was priced at back in April,” he added. “Could the stock top the $80 it hit back in 2021? Possibly, but this time Wall Street will be better prepared. It’s more aware that retail investors, via apps like RobinHood, can move markets. And it may even be in a position to capitalise on that. Either way, it looks like GameStop is not quite ready to accept its movie script ending.”
Halfway to the bull market top
Bitcoin has been trapped in a range between $56,000 and $73,000 for the past three months as the top crypto consolidated around its most recent halving, but according to veteran trader Peter Brandt, it could soon resume its climb higher as the bull market resumes.
“The ‘Halvings’ have represented the half-way points of past bull market cycles,” Brandt wrote in an article posted on Sunday. “More specifically, the number of weeks from the start of each bull market cycle (the low following a 75%-plus decline) to the Halving dates has been almost equal to the number of weeks from the Halving dates to the subsequent bull market highs, as shown on the chart” below.
“If this sequence continues, the next bull market cycle high should occur in late Aug/early Sep 2025,” he said.
As for how high Bitcoin could go during this bull cycle, Brandt noted that while “No method of analysis is fool-proof, it should be noted that the highs of past bull markets line up quite well against an inverted parabolic curve.”
“Should this tendency also continue, the high of this bull market cycle could be in the $130,000 to $150,00 range,” he said. “The X on the chart marks the probably high date and price level.”
Brandt added that while the view presented in this post is his “preferred analysis,” it is not his only interpretation, and he continues “ to place a 25% probability that Bitcoin price has topped for this cycle.”
“Should Bitcoin fail to make a decisive new ATH and decline below $55,000 I will raise the probability of the Exponential Decay,” he concluded.
According to the latest strategy session from PlanB, the creator of the Bitcoin stock-to-flow (S2F) model, BTC is about to pump in a similar fashion as it did following the halvings in 2020, 2017, and 2012.
“It’s the first month after the halving, and the start of the new cycle,” PlanB said. “So, in my opinion, Bitcoin will pump after the halving like it did last halving cycle in 2020, and the cycle before it in 2017, and also after the halving in 2012 in 2013. So I think we’ll see a pump again and of course, that’s the core of the stock-to-flow model, but time will tell.”
To back up his projection, PlanB used the realized price metric, which records the value of all coins in a current time frame at the price they were last transacted on-chain, divided by the number of BTC in circulation.
“It’s a support level for bull market dips, like this dip in the 2020 bull market,” he said. “It jumped off this support line and the same happened in 2017, this bull market dip jumped off the light blue line here as well.”
“So, I expect that to happen again, and in fact, we saw it in April,” PlanB said. “April dipped, it was in a bull market, and okay, the five-month realized price was $60,000, and Bitcoin was slightly below that at $59,000 or $58,000, but still, in terms of monthly closes, the five-month realized price was an excellent support level and we bounced this month in May off that level.”
In a follow-up tweet on Monday, PlanB noted that the “Bitcoin 200-week moving average is $36k, and rising,” highlighting the appearance of a new red dot on the S2F chart.
“See that 1st red dot?” he asked. “What usually happens after 1st red dot?”
