Traders look for volatility triggers as BTC price action continues within an all-too-familiar trading range.
Bitcoin (BTC) saw rejection at a key area of whale resistance into Oct. 7 as its strict trading range continued.
BTC/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView
Charts point to impending breakout
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD staging two attempts to crack $20,400, both meeting rejection.
The pair had crisscrossed the $20,000 mark during the week, with neither the bulls nor the bears able to effect significant trend disruption.
For Michaël van de Poppe, founder and CEO of trading firm Eight, that could be about to change.
“Big day today, unemployment data coming out,” he told Twitter followers on the day about forthcoming United States statistics:
“Price action to move heavily after that, I assume.”
Popular trader Cheds agreed that volatility would likely enter, given constricting Bollinger Bands on the BTC/USD daily chart.
BTC/USD 1-day candle chart with Bollinger Bands (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView
The overall macro picture was finely balanced prior to the Wall Street open, with the U.S. dollar index (DXY) notably consolidating after recouping some of its prior losses.
DXY was steady above 112 at the time of writing — around two points below recent 20-year highs.
U.S. dollar index (DXY) 1-hour candle chart. Source: TradingView
“Staggering” whale support confirmed
Overnight BTC price action, meanwhile, played into a theory already released by on-chain analytics resource, Whalemap.
Related: Bitcoin repeats key bear market move as $19K becomes key BTC price zone
Focusing on whale buy and sell levels, data showed that the area around $20,380 would be an important one to clear in order to set up a run higher.
“So far the resistance at $20,380 (that is due to a whale accumulation of ~20,200 BTC) has been working quite well, with the latest rejection being almost to the dollar accurate,” the Whalemap team told Cointelegraph in private comments:
“Our support remains unchanged since the drop from 30k. It lies at $19,174 and was formed all the way back on 18th June 2022 by a staggering accumulation of ~101,300 BTC by whale wallets. There is also one more resistance above $20,380, at $21,543. But first we need to at least break above $20,380.”
In the event, Bitcoin failed twice to overcome it, falling back under $20,000 thereafter.
BTC/USD annotated chart showing whale clusters. Source: Whalemap
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