Bitcoin just hit a nine-month high
Institutional money is coming back
The old highs may only be the beginning
Bitcoin used to be impossible to ignore.
Every rally had a new price target. Every selloff had somebody declaring the whole thing dead. Your neighbor bought some. Your barber had a theory. Half of X had laser eyes.
Now? Not much.
AI has most of the attention. Stocks are making plenty of their own headlines. Even crypto people seem more interested in whatever coin, prediction market, or new AI model showed up this week.
Meanwhile Bitcoin just traded to its highest level in nine months. And nobody seems to care this time.
That got my attention. Because oftentimes complacency creates the best trades in the market.
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Institutions Are Buying Bitcoin Again
Here are the weekly flows into BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF, IBIT:
The latest week brought in roughly $1.2 billion.
That’s the biggest weekly inflow in over a year.
And there have been plenty of ugly weeks in between.
You can see money leave during the fall. More went out around the beginning of the year. May and June had some big down bars too.
But look at what’s happened since.
The flows started improving through the summer and now we’ve had the largest week in almost a year.
This matters because of who can buy the ETF.
Before spot Bitcoin ETFs existed, owning Bitcoin was kind of a pain in the ass for normies. You needed a crypto account. You had to think about custody. And for a lot of traditional investors and advisers it simply wasn’t worth the trouble.
That problem is mostly gone.
Now Bitcoin can sit in the same brokerage account as Apple, Treasury bonds, or the S&P 500.
Financial advisers can buy it. Institutions can buy it. Portfolio managers can buy it. People who had absolutely no interest in opening an account at a crypto exchange can buy it.
And now we can actually watch that money come in.
Nobody needs to tell us how bullish they are.
They’re buying.
What I find interesting is when they’re doing it.
Bitcoin has spent months doing basically nothing.
This isn’t the part of the cycle when your Uber driver is asking whether he should buy Bitcoin. At least not yet.
The trade lost some of its shine. Most people have moved on to other things.
But the most important people — the financial institutions — have not.
And that should matter to you.
Zoom Out and Look
Now look at Bitcoin:
This is a monthly chart going back to 2015.
I highlighted three areas.
The first came after the 2017 run.
Bitcoin peaked, fell more than 80%, and then spent a long time going nowhere. By 2019 the selling had mostly stopped. Price built a base and eventually started working higher again.
Then came another huge advance.
The next one followed the 2021 peak.
Bitcoin got crushed again. It spent most of 2022 falling and then started building another base.
Same general idea.
The selling slowed down. Bitcoin stopped making new lows. Price went sideways for a while. Then it started going up.
Now look at the right side of the chart.
Bitcoin made another major high, corrected, and has spent most of this year stuck below it.
Until now.
We just traded to a nine-month high.
Now obviously I’m not saying these three periods are identical.
They aren’t.
Markets would be a hell of a lot easier if you could circle the same shape three times and know what happens next.
But Bitcoin does have a habit of moving in bursts.
It runs hard. Everyone notices. Eventually the move gets crowded and price corrects.
Then comes the boring part.
Bitcoin stops going up every week. The media outlets stop talking about it. People find something else to focus on.
And sometimes that boring period lasts a LONG time.
But that’s also where nearly all of Bitcoin’s biggest moves have started.
Which brings us back to today.
Price is beginning to push out of one of those boring periods while money is coming back into the ETF. I like that. A lot.
There’s something else on this chart I keep coming back to.
Everyone knows where the old highs are. They’re obvious.
And if Bitcoin keeps going, those highs are going to get a ton of attention.
But I’m not sure the old high is the most interesting part of this trade.
Go back and look at the previous bases.
When Bitcoin finally got moving, it didn’t simply revisit the old high, shake everyone’s hand, and go home.
It kept going.
And by the time those moves were over, the old high was just another price on the chart.
Again.. that doesn’t mean Bitcoin has to do the same thing here.
But if this really is the beginning of another Bitcoin cycle, I don’t think we should automatically assume the old high is where the story ends.
It might be where things get interesting.
What I’m Watching Right Now
Do I think Bitcoin goes straight up from here? No.
That would be nice.. but Bitcoin has never been particularly interested in making life easy for people who own it.
There will be pullbacks. Probably some violent ones.
But I care more about whether this breakout holds.
Because I already have a lot of money at risk on the trade.
We just made a nine month high. Buyers are starting to win again. Even if retail isn’t included.
If Bitcoin falls right back into the range? Fine. Then we have new information and we deal with it. But it hasn’t.
I’m also watching those ETF flows. One $1.2 billion week is great. Now show me another one. And another one.
Because Bitcoin isn’t some tiny asset anymore. It takes real money to move this thing.
The ETF opened Bitcoin up to an enormous pool of capital that either couldn’t buy it before or simply couldn’t be bothered to jump through all the hoops.
And that money is starting to show up again.
Meanwhile almost nobody seems particularly excited about Bitcoin.
I’m sure that changes if we get back to the old highs.
Nothing brings people back to a trade like price.
But they’re not back yet.
Right now Bitcoin is making a nine month high while BlackRock’s ETF is seeing its strongest inflows in almost a year.
The crowd may have moved on. But the money is flooding back in.
Follow the money,
Hamilton
Founder, The Trading Initiative
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