Forty-eight hours to forget fear. Bitcoin is trading around $80,400 this Thursday at 6:45 a.m. (Paris time) after a low of $75,618 on Tuesday evening and a high of $81,180 overnight. Yesterday's point at $76,600 pointed to a Democratic sweep and flagging ETF flows. Since then, the market fear index has doubled.
Three figures to remember before opening your charts (price to double-check as you read): the Fear & Greed index back to 50, the Strategy STRC back to 100 dollars and the Dow Jones which has its best session since April 2025.
Fear & Greed back to 50 after Bitcoin short squeeze
On Tuesday, the Fear & Greed index from Alternative.me showed 26 and on Wednesday it was still 34. This Thursday morning it was at 50, in the neutral zone, while it was around 70 a month ago. A complete round trip in forty-eight hours, time for the short sellers to get out.
The trigger has a number. As it passed $80,000 late Wednesday afternoon, $269 million in short positions were liquidated in one hour according to Binance data. The Block notes that ether gained nearly 6% in the aftermath and crypto stocks followed, while Bitwise reads the measured reaction to the Binance hack as a sign of a more mature market. Ether is trading at $2,422 this morning, Solana at $96 and XRP at $1.31.
The downside is ETFs. Spot funds saw $399 million in outflows on November 2, the heaviest from IBIT since June. The feeds from Wednesday's session, to be collated with Farside before publication, will tell whether the squeeze convinced institutional investors or only leveraged traders.
STRC at 100 dollars, Strategy restarts the bitcoin machine
The second signal comes from Virginia. At 1:44 p.m. New York time on Wednesday, STRC, Strategy's perpetual preferred stock, hit $100 for the first time since May. Bitcoin Magazine recalls the price of this return to par, more than 2 billion dollars in redemptions and 2.25 billion since the opening of the discount, including 205 million the week of October 19 while bitcoin purchases were at a standstill.
Why does this matter for the course? At $100, Strategy can stop repurchasing its title and start issuing shares over time, and each dollar raised goes into bitcoin. The November dividend is set at 12% annualized and has been paid daily since Monday, following a 99.3% vote on October 28. The company holds 849,327 BTC at an average price of $75,446, 6% below this morning's price.
Keep an eye out for the next weekly purchase. A figure well above last week's 811 BTC will mean that the tap is reopened.
Wall Street, oil and the blue wave, what Bitcoin owes to macro
Third signal, the largest. The Dow Jones gained around 3% on Wednesday, its best session since April 2025, the S&P 500 almost 2% and the Nasdaq around 1.5%. The American ten-year fell to 4.895%. And WTI oil fell 8% to $88.50 when Chuck Schumer promised to “end the war” in Iran and J.D. Vance admitted that “the reason for defeat is the war.”
Details matter for crypto. Gold gained 3.7% towards $4,065 and the dollar hit a one-month low, two tailwinds for Bitcoin. Not everything is green though. Nvidia and Tesla fell, data center builders lost 12% after local votes against their projects in 29 communities, and the TRUMP token fell 20% under threat of Democratic investigations. Trump Media also moved 4,259 BTC to Crypto.com overnight. Joel Kruger (LMAX Group) sums up the sentiment of the day: the markets had already integrated the Democratic wave.
JPMorgan chose this moment to include Bitcoin in its long-term 2027 assumptions with an expected annualized return of 10%, according to several media.
