The full round trip - about $3,000 in less than a day. The peak came on Wednesday evening (Bitstamp data); by midday on October 22, BTC was trading near $81,900. The CoinDesk 80 index lost 3.5%, the DeFi token index - 6%.
The trigger - Tesla's third-quarter report. Revenue was $28.05 billion versus Bloomberg's expectation of $28.13 billion, but the main thing was capital expenditures (spending on equipment and construction), which came in at $4.73 billion instead of the forecast $7.96 billion. Ryan Lee, senior vice president at Direxion: "Lower capex suggests a less decisive approach to the AI race than you'd expect from Elon." The market read this as a cooling of the AI theme: Nasdaq 100 futures fell 1.1%, and South Korea's KOSPI closed down 3.52%.
According to CoinGlass, of $431 million in daily liquidations (forced closure of leveraged positions), $173 million hit shorts during the rally. And over the last 12 hours, of $222 million, $210 million came from longs. The largest single position was a BTC long worth $11.8 million on Binance, closed near $83,500.
In altcoins, ETH dropped below $2,400 (-2%), SOL - by 3% to $104, DOGE - by almost 4%, HYPE - by 4.5% to $78. XMR moved against the market: +11%, to $650.
Open interest (the sum of all open futures positions) reached $55.95 billion by the end of Tuesday, adding 4.5% in a day - the highest since September 25. The higher it is, the harsher the cascades in both directions. The key support zone is seen at $80,000-81,500: that's where the average purchase price of U.S. spot exchange-traded funds on BTC lies.
Forecasting the price direction is not our job; what matters is that the market remains overloaded with leverage.
Were you long on the move toward $85,000?
Many catch a $3,000 pullback overnight, but not everyone makes it to the payout - and more often because of the rules, not the entry. Prop firms calculate daily drawdown differently, interpret holding a position overnight differently, and trading during earnings reports is sometimes banned outright. These points determine whether your strategy survives in the program or not. It's worth checking the parameters in a calm market, not after your account has been disabled.