It’s been no secret that the extended consolidation here has been… boring. We have had very little movement in any direction. In fact, at the time of writing this (1524 CST) the range between the open and the close of the weekly chart is a whopping 70 bucks. 70 bucks. That’s just an insanely tight range.

Sure, we have a couple more days left for the weekly to actually pan out, but let’s look at the volume bar on the weekly.

With the exception of a week back in November 2016, this is the lowest volume week in the history of Coinbase. How low? It’s lower than Christmas’s trading week. That is pretty damn low.

But why?

The best answer is: who knows. But there are a number of reasons why:

1. It’s vacation time. Anyone who is a trader knows that June-August is the doldrums of trading (same as the winter holidays).

2. SEC classifying cryptos as securities. Which we should all want. When that happens, the floodgate of real institutional money comes flowing in. There’s all this talk about ‘whales’. People who only trade cryptos have no idea what a whale is. When you start to get investment and retirement funds here, then we’re talking whales. Many are prohibited from participating in this most speculative of speculative markets due to fiduciary responsibilities. If the SEC labels cryptos as a security (again, omg, for tax filing purposes, please) then we’re in a whole new ball game.

3. Based solely on technicals, this is a normal condition of the near end of an accumulation phase – this is also coupled with the part of DOW theory that when overall sentiment is still ‘bearish’, prices remain in a consolidated zone. We’ve been in the same swing value area since February 2018. The next phase after this is the ‘public participation phase’. This is where we see a regular and frequent increase in prices where they expand and expand until we hit the excess phase with all-time highs and then we sell off like we did in Dec-Jan. The cycle repeats itself.