crypto has been climbing the wall of worry for the last month. something stocks have been quite familiar with for the last few years. so here's what i think is set up. there's a huge cohort of 4 year cyclers who've been waiting for the october bottom. "muh october bottom, october bottom." they didn't believe the first pump off 60k. they told themselves it'd scam back down and they'd load up in october. well, it's late september. if this weekly holds, they're sidelined watching a higher high print. that's a recipe for fomo. i think it pushes us higher near term, somewhere in the 90-97k zone as the next stop. price forces the october people to chase because they think the window is closing forever. wherever that chase runs out of buyers is closeish to a local top. maybe a few more percent on btc, maybe more on alts, then a correction. those super late longs don't get a free ride. a q4 with no bottom wick would kinda surprise me. right now the market is pressing sideliners and making them second guess themselves. that's a gnarly place to be. i know because i've been there. late 2018. bitcoin sat at 6k for six months, nuked to 3k, sat there for two more. i bought half my bag around 4k on the way down. then i looked at the chart, said "this looks like absolute shit, it's going to 2k," and waited for the rest. it went 3k to 5-6k very, very fast. and i kept my bear bias. "bearish retest of 6k. just liquidating late shorts. we're heading back down." i couldn't let it go. i ended up buying the rest at 7-8k. in hindsight that was still a good buy. but the execution was terrible. like, really terrible. i could have bought at 6k for six months. i could have bought at 3k for two months. and when the impulse candle came and the thing that would flip my bias actually happened, i didn't flip. i ended up with less than half the bitcoin i could have had. and the dumb part is i was long term bullish the whole time. i thought 100k in 2021. i just got greedy trying to scratch out a few more coins at the bottom instead of saying "this is good enough." the one thing i'll give myself credit for is buying back at 8k instead of holding out. because every day you're sidelined while price goes up, it eats at you. you know other people bought earlier. the timeline's euphoric. you think you fucked up, then you get stubborn and decide maybe you were right all along. that loop is exactly how someone stays sidelined from 3k to 10k to 15k, and by the time they give in, a lot of the "easier" gains are gone. though it's never easy at the time. there's always risk. but looking back you go, "how did i miss that". so for anyone sidelined right now: i'm not telling you to fomo in up here. it depends on what you're buying, your time horizon, whether you're spot or levered. what i am saying is set the bear bias aside and think cleanly. put the past in the past. whatever you decided in july doesn't matter anymore. make the best decision for you, today, with the chart you actually have in front of you.