Treasury Just Flipped the Setup for BTC & Gold w/ Kris Bullock & Bijan Maleki | Trading the Markets Aug. 19, 2026

**Bijan Maleki** (0:07)
Happy Wednesday, everyone, and welcome back to another edition of Trading the Markets. We had a different show prepared for you today, but I think about half an hour before we're about to go on. Everything just completely, well, maybe not everything, but quite a few things changed. If you've looked at your portfolio right now, you probably are enjoying the green candles that you haven't seen in a while, especially if you are more heavily into crypto. So we welcome that. We're going to dive into that, see what's going on in the market, why things are green. But is this a bear trap? Some people in the community think so, but we're going to look at the charts to really see if that is the case.
Kris, happy Wednesday. How are you?

**Kris Bullock** (0:59)
Yes, I'm doing well. I'm looking forward to this, actually. Like I said, there's a lot going on right now. It's kind of exciting. I'm going to push back. I think it's a little bit more durable than just a flag, but we'll see. I mean, obviously tomorrow we'll tell. But I think based on what I've discovered and kind of gone through and what I'm going to lay out, I think it's a little bit more durable than that. I think we're seeing a little bit more to it. But before we get into everything, I want to first start by saying I've tweaked my visual settings on my Trading View layout to make the contrast better in an effort to make it more readable. So I'm going to do a couple of different things here. I'm going to start the show in the dark mode as I usually have it, though it is an enhanced dark mode with better contrast. So I want you to look at this as we go through the show, watch this, see what you think, and then about halfway through the show, I'm going to flip it to light mode and see what that looks like. And then at the end of the show, I want you to leave a comment on the platform and tell me which one you think is better, and I'll see what we think going forward. And so I'm trying to make this ultimately a better viewing experience for as many people as possible. So we'll see how it goes. But yeah, I'm going to start with that and moving along. Now, what's going on?
Well, it kind of, I think the big catalyst that all started this off was the Treasury announcing this morning that they're going to double buybacks basically on the 10th and the 30th year beginning September 9th. So that means major buying of Treasuries basically. And so what that did is that dropped the, it dropped the long end of the yields way down. We have these big red candles on the 10th year, on the 30th year.
This ultimately is bullish. This resulted in a drop in the dollar, which we see here, which is also bullish. So those things are very bullish for Bitcoin, very bullish for gold, things like that. That was the thing that started all of this off. We had the bond yields coming down drastically. We had the dollar coming down drastically. And then along the same lines yesterday, the CFTC and the SEC announced some pretty major policy announcements that are very favorable towards crypto that are going to take place, regardless of whether the Clarity Act comes online or not. They have like this regulation and crypto assets proposal, clearer token classifications, staking and DeFi guidance, you know, broader regulated crypto market access. So the SEC is doing favorable things. The Yield, the Treasury is doing favorable things.
This has kind of resulted in an inflow in ETFs, which we see here. So we're having a pretty decent week in ETFs coming up. So like all of these things are starting to pile on, you know, the macro became favorable, sort of the financial conditions became a little bit more favorable, which is causing big money to kind of start dipping in a little bit more. You know, we had a down week last week, but, you know, a decent positive week this week. And so all of those things kind of aligned and caught a lot of crypto people off guard. And it resulted in a very big short squeeze that we can see that's happening right now. Now, this is a 90 day time frame, but this is the biggest short squeeze, not only in the last 90 days, but actually going all the way back to, as far back as this chart here goes, back to 2023, outside of the events of October 10th, October, yeah, right here, or October 8th rather, whatever, wherever this is. But those were mostly long liquidations.