For the past week, BTC has been trading in a corridor of $80,000 - $84,000, and the narrow range has held since September 21. On the morning of October 21, the price was around $83,350. Average daily spot market volume is $2.5 billion, 1% less than a week earlier.
Vetle Lunde, head of research at K33: "Such compressions are usually followed by expansion; we expect BTC volatility to rise soon." K33 compared the low participant activity to the 2023 market recovery period.
Meanwhile, institutions are buying. On October 19, BlackRock's IBIT fund (the largest exchange-traded Bitcoin fund - through it, BTC is bought like a regular stock) attracted volume equal to 8,128 BTC: its best day in bitcoins since April 2025. All US spot Bitcoin funds combined saw an inflow of 6,436 BTC, meaning the other funds lost 1,692 BTC.
The link to equities is back: BTC's correlation with Nasdaq has risen again after weakening in August and September, and the two assets' returns over the past two weeks were almost identical. Last week, Nasdaq had its worst week since the start of April 2025 - after higher-than-expected US inflation for September and a sell-off in semiconductors on reports of a Chinese breakthrough in memory chips. BTC lost only about 2% then, but K33 warns: this is not a decoupling from the stock market.
Two events are next on the calendar: the Fed meeting on October 28 (the market estimates an 80% probability of rates staying unchanged) and the US midterm elections on November 3.
Been stuck in this corridor since September?
A month in the $80-84 thousand range is more exhausting than a crash: there are trades, but no movement, and the result is treading water. And when the compression finally releases, what will decide everything is not the precision of your entry, but the notional you're trading at that moment - the same percentages on different accounts produce different sums. In prop trading, the company provides the capital to trade: it tests you on a paid evaluation account, then gives you access to its notional and shares the profits. It's easier to understand the scheme now, while the market sleeps, rather than on October 28.