An Open Letter to Friendship:
Today’s issue is about a lot more than charts, so bear with me while I address these important lessons up front. Last week I ended a decade-long friendship over what ultimately amounted to pride, stupidity, and arrogance. More specifically—a total refusal to acknowledge elementary math, statistical evidence, and eventually reality itself.
Today’s core message:
Being wrong is normal.
Refusing to update your beliefs when the evidence changes is a choice.
The older I get, the more I realize the lessons I’ve learned while mastering my own trading psychology can be applied to a hell of a lot more than just Investing.
Chief among them: being unable to admit when you’re wrong.
It is one of the most financially destructive qualities an Investor can possess.
It also happens to be one of the most costly qualities you can bring into a friendship.
The absence of humility eventually infects every aspect of a relationship, and usually manifests itself in one of these ways:
Refusing to discuss things logically
Treating disagreement as insubordination
Escalating disagreements into ultimatums
Choosing pride over conflict resolution
Choosing not to respond when the friendship itself is genuinely on the line
Different behaviors. Same root problem.
Pride | Hubris | Insecurity | Perceived status | Poor metacognition
It is stupefying to me how many allegedly grown adult men possess some combination of these traits.
Something else I don’t think gets discussed nearly enough:
Success can change relationships.
Nobody prepares you for how differently some people will treat you once your life starts moving in a clearly successful direction.
They become condescending
They minimize or challenge your wins
They become combative for no apparent reason
They become uncharacteristically emotional over things that should otherwise be trivial
Maybe it’s jealousy, maybe it’s insecurity, maybe it’s a feeling of inferiority.
Maybe they simply don’t believe you deserve the success that they want for themselves.
Maybe new circumstances expose relationship dynamics that were always present, but remained hidden underneath the surface.
I can’t tell you what it is. Maybe it’s a combination of all of the above.
What I can tell you for certain, is that you will notice the change.
IT IS BLATANT.
Night and day. Like their entire personality flips 180°.
It is genuinely bizarre to experience first-hand.
A real friend does not need to agree with you. They do not need to validate every decision you make, stroke your ego, accept your ultimatums, or tell you that you’re right when you are obviously wrong.
A real friend should be capable of celebrating your wins with you, challenging your errors honestly, admitting when they are obviously wrong, and showing up when the friendship itself is at stake.
If they can’t do that, are they even a real friend?
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t perfect in this situation either.
I intentionally escalated things; I said things I knew were inflammatory.
I deliberately pushed buttons once I realized the conversation had no chance at becoming productive. And I did it because I have absolutely zero time or patience for people who refuse to acknowledge black-and-white factual evidence. Especially when they respond to said evidence by doubling down on their error and issuing authoritarian ultimatums.
“Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”
— Obi-Wan Kenobi
I own my part, but owning my antagonism does not require pretending it was the reason the friendship died.
There is a monumental difference between escalating an already broken conversation, and creating the conditions that broke it in the first place. At one point, this person actually told me disagreeing with them was comparable to a mid-level employee telling a CEO how to run their company.
Think about that dynamic for a second…
Between supposed “friends.”
There are no employment dynamics between friends. There are no hierarchies. Friendships are innately peer-to-peer. That kind of mentality is both delusional and extremely toxic. Not to mention, the best CEOs in the world are the ones who ingest contradictory information, and admit when they’re wrong exceptionally quickly.
Accept that success will cost you some relationships.
Not because success changes you, but because it changes the balance.
It changes perceived status dynamics between people. It exposes insecurities in others that may have remained dormant under old relationship dynamics. It also reveals behaviors in others you never had a good reason to notice before.
Pay attention to people who celebrate your successes with you, and those who diminish them
Pay attention to people who willingly engage with facts, evidence, and logical arguments—without turning them into status contests
Pay attention to those who clutch onto ultimatums the moment they can no longer defend their position
Pay attention to those who can admit they are wrong quickly, without it becoming a personal loss or failure
Real friendships survive disagreement. They survive distance. They survive enormous changes in life. Others just reveal how surface-level they were the moment meaningful circumstances change.
Learn the difference, and be prepared for your social circle to shrink when you achieve real success.
Intro & last edition recap:
Twenty-three days have passed since I published my Emergency Crypto Issue where we confirmed the start of a new bull market. If you still don’t think we’ve entered a fresh bull market by now, there is no helping you.
The proof is in the pudding:
1. $BTC officially broke the bear market structure on August 20th.
Price reclaimed and closed beyond the 20 / 50 / 100 / 200D moving averages.
FUN FACT: Bitcoin has only once in its entire 18-year history (COVID included) printed a false Bull Market signal when price has closed above all Daily moving averages simultaneously, with the 20D crossing up through the 200D - regardless of whether you use EMA or SMA. That year was 2014.
2. $TOTAL3ES exploded +35% from roughly $370B into the ~$500B area.
Concrete evidence of enormous broad-risk expansion.
3. $ETH finally became a market leader and rallied ~35% across 5 days to ~$2,540.
Price has since consolidated in a textbook technical flag rather than immediately round-tripping.
4. Stablecoin dominance COLLAPSED: $STABLE.C.D moving down from ~14.30% towards ~11.60% while crypto capitalization expanded, is direct evidence that capital stopped hiding in cash equivalents and rotated into broad-risk names.
Despite this overwhelming evidence, I can still hear someone screaming about the 50W SMA.
Historically, reclaiming the 50W Simple Moving Average has been one of the most obvious confirmations that a Bitcoin (Crypto) bear market is actually over.
But confirmation is all that it is; CONFIRMATION.
The 50-week SMA is averaging almost an entire year of pricing data. If you’re relying on that single indicator before acknowledging the market has fundamentally changed before your eyes, you’re not identifying true regime change. You’re waiting for the regime shift to become painfully obvious to everyone.
Being wrong is normal.
Refusing to update your beliefs when the evidence changes is a choice.
This is not a theoretical lesson. My portfolio is +260% since mid-August.
Not because I waited until every indicator on the board finally gave me permission to be bullish, but because I recognized the regime shift early enough to act while the asymmetry was still exceptional. That’s the entire point.
Final confirmation makes you feel safe. It also arrives AFTER much of the early-cycle asymmetry has already been repriced. Every single market participant is looking at the same shit you are; if you want to beat them, you need to understand more than blatantly obvious confirmation signals.
When you observe consecutive correlated macro signals: Bitcoin exploding through Daily structure, Ethereum waking up and leading Alts, Stablecoin dominance collapsing, $TOTAL3ES exploding +35%, and legitimate leadership rotation appearing across the Alt market, you should probably reconsider your exclusive reliance on one lagging indicator.
That doesn’t make the 50W irrelevant—it just makes it the lowest-value FINAL receipt.
What did I get wrong?
I got the immediate continuation call wrong on $BTC and $ETH.
Both are now trading around ~$77K and ~$2,500 respectively, almost exactly where they were when I published the last issue three weeks ago.
Where I was absolutely correct, was the broader Alt universe:
Those are enormous raw moves across ~23 days. In some cases nearly +2% per day.
So I’ll amend my prior advice to say [outside of the two market leaders] you risked missing violent expansion moves on relative-strength Alts. Therefore, when we are presented with future pullbacks, don’t miss your shot at asymmetric entry prices.
One such pullback is well underway this weekend, so let’s look at the data.
Arguably the most important chart for the next 18+ months
$TOTAL3ES
What the hell are we looking at? You might be asking…
This right here is your new Alt Market Bible. It will tell you more about current market conditions than any other indicator. If this MCAP sinks, Alts sink - if it rises, Alts rise.
At the far left side (on August 21st) Alts pushed into ~$502B and rejected hard.
That is now blatant sell supply. We know that level is not trivial, and it will be difficult to break through without time consolidation. Then the prior local high of $485B (May 2025) became a secondary sell supply rejection zone.
This lines up almost perfectly with Bitcoin’s price action, which you’ll see below in the next section.
We subsequently chopped around over the following ~11 days while liquidity rotated between different Alt leaders. We then retested ~$450B on September 2nd (-10% total drawdown) before attempt number two at the ~$500B level just several days ago.
We’ve now clearly rejected from that ~$500B sell supply again. And worse, we’ve also decisively lost the $485B line. All while a bearish divergence prints on the 6hr RSI.
Why I’m not concerned (yet)
I also said last issue that unless $440B is lost, I am tranquilo bro.
$440B represents the major 200D EMA line, and is still almost +20% away from the June lows. It is absolutely normal and healthy for price to retest major support (demand) zones during the transition out of a bear market. It would be extremely concerning if we had simply wicked up to ~$500B and then reverted the following week. That is NOT what has happened, not by a long shot.
What’s worth buying here?
I’m going to start this section with a very clear disclaimer:
UNTIL ~$485B IS RECLAIMED + HELD…
LONGS REQUIRE ENORMOUS BURDEN OF PROOF.
I’m not shorting much right now, and until that critical level is reclaimed, my near-term bias is split roughly between sideways chop, and deeper LTF correction.
One comparison worth making here is the end of the 2022 bear market vs. today’s Bitcoin charts. They line up with TOTAL3ES almost perfectly, specifically the prior local high interactions.
Bitcoin 2022-2023:
Bitcoin Present Day:
You could easily be mistaken for thinking these Bitcoin charts are nearly identical, save for the 4-year time gap. That’s because they practically are.
You’ll notice four orange circles: In the 2022 chart those circles identify the local August high of $25K, followed by the retest/rejection of that level in March, 2023. Traders who mistook that rejection back down to ~$20K for evidence that the Bull Market wasn’t real, missed arguably the 2nd best entry of the entire ATH run.
Fast forward to today, and we’ve already retested May’s ~$82K local high, and have started rejecting it. If you mistake this for a sign the Bull Market isn’t real, you have an extremely high probability of repeating that same 2023 mistake. Bitcoin could correct from here back down to the mid-$60K range, and it would not invalidate the Bull Market in any way, shape or form.
So long as price continues to closes above ~$60K and forms a higher-low structure, the bull remains in tact.
The only scenario in which I will abandon my Bull Market thesis, is if Bitcoin closes below ~$57K for multiple days. That is the only valid path to Bull Market invalidation from here.
$ZEC - still a dominant market leader.
We’ve started what “could” be a meaningful correction here, but I’m a buyer anywhere between $1,000 / $888 / $759.
Those would be phenomenal reload zones. Conversely, if we start closing back above ~$1,170 I expect rapid trend continuation and price discovery.
$UNI - another dominant relative-strength monster.
We’ve lost 6hr Trendline, but this is a relatively shallow pullback. It also happens to coincide with the Daily Trendline which is the controlling timeframe. This could be the best reload station we get for a while.
I’m a buyer here until $5.89 is lost. If we start closing under that, then the odds of deeper correction increase substantially.
$ DASH - Personally my favorite ticker.
This thing is foolish. The upside potential here is beyond words.
This could arguably be the strongest Weekly chart in the Alt universe.
We’ve already closed beyond the 200W EMA and I want to see it turned into support;
it would also be the best reload station imaginable. The only ejection seat for me on this one is if we start closing price < ~$43.
The Daily price levels coincide with the Weekly chart beautifully.
The 2025 local high was ~$150 and the previous All Time High is ~$480.
There is NO guarantee we approach prior ATH levels, but at minimum we have an easy 3x from here. The fundamentals on Dashpay are exceptional, and we’re still well under ~$700M MCAP. Long-term this is an easy multi-billion dollar company.
Adoption and awareness have just started increasing.
This was an extremely long issue. It took me the better part of two days to author an essay focused on friendship that I felt was actually worthy of publication, but I’m glad I did it. Those lessons extend far beyond personal relationships; they are directly relevant to Trading Psychology, decision-making, and how we respond when reality contradicts our beliefs. As Investors, as Humans.
I can think of nothing more important to teach you.
It will be relevant for the rest of your life.
There are nearly another dozen Alts I’m actively tracking. The names covered above are simply the strongest macro charts on my radar right now. If you want expanded access to the rest of my analysis, you know what to do!
Live market analysis is shared daily via X and in my free Discord community
The Heron Room.
As always—Trade Smart, Reduce Your Risk, and Stay Safe!
— DTS