The Crypto Bull Slams Into Fourth Gear VIEW IN BROWSER By Michael Salvatore, Editor, TradeSmith Daily In This Digest: - Do you feel that shift beneath your feet?
- How to ride the altcoin wave and not be the last sucker…
- U.S. consumers and workers remain unstoppable…
- The end of July looms large…
- Why trading seasonality is the best bet for the rest of 2025…
The stampede back into crypto begins anew… I want to laugh and cry at the same time. As I’ll never tire of reminding you, I’ve been pounding the table on bitcoin since October 2023. My conviction back then came from the immediate reactions of my good friends, thinking my WhatsApp account was hacked by a scammer simply because I told them I thought bitcoin was going to go up. At the time, bitcoin was around $35,000. Now, it’s more than three times that price. That’s why I want to laugh and cry tears of joy. But more recently, we’ve been looking for signs that the later stage of the crypto cycle is starting. This, as I’ve showed you, is about the time where people start looking for the kinds of returns they missed out on by being late to the bitcoin party. Or maybe, even those who made money in bitcoin want to keep the profit party going. They do that by peeling their eyes from bitcoin – maybe even selling some (which I’m personally not planning on) – and playing around in the higher-risk side of the crypto universe… And in doing so, they tend to spin up narratives about how the so-called “altcoins” will accrue value. This makes me want to nervous-laugh and sympathy-cry for the people who are just starting to think about crypto now. Sure enough, altcoins are trading much higher than they were just three months ago – when the king of altcoins, Ethereum (ETH), looked down for the count. We told you back then, too, that altcoins like Ethereum were a cautious buy. ETH is up 117% from those levels. 
I can almost feel the crypto market shifting beneath my feet… It’s like a small quake along the San Andreas Fault, doing just the right amount of damage to seem like a manageable threat… While in reality, it’s laying the groundwork for a catastrophic destruction event. I’m sure you feel it too… Internet-native bank SoFi (SOFI) recently announced that “crypto is back” on its platform. It will soon let users buy a limited selection of cryptocurrencies directly. Now that bitcoin is up more than 3X over the past two years, the upstart fintechs have decided it’s time to let its users back on the bandwagon. The reasons are, as always, self-serving. Unsurprisingly, the SOFI stock is up about 35% since they made this announcement, as shown below: 
These are the late-stage signs to watch for. People are clamoring for crypto after forgetting about it since the 2022 bear market, and the market is meeting that demand. Soon, everyone from Fortune 500 CEOs to your Uber driver will claim once again that crypto will change the world… in some new, cockamamie way. Maybe it’s tokenization and stablecoins, like we posited. Maybe it will be old schemes – like NFTs or DeFi or Metaverse. It does not matter. What matters is that the ride up will be stunning. Trillions in capital will get involved. It will make progressively less sense as the money piles up… until the last poor sucker buys the top and millions of hearts get broken. No matter what happens in this next phase, we should milk it for all its worth. For confirmation of this shift in trend, let’s look at our favorite chart… The ratio of ETH against BTC. As we mentioned, we suggested a cautious speculation on ETH as it was trading near its all-time low relative valuation to bitcoin back in April. Since then, ETH/BTC bounced from that level, battled significant resistance at around 0.25, and retested the bottom of the long-term downtrend channel before taking off. Now it’s approaching the high of that channel: 
Altcoin bulls really, really want ETH to break above this downtrend channel and keep going higher. That would light a roaring fire under the $1.4 trillion market in crypto that is not bitcoin, sending it very likely to new all-time highs: 
Another great chart to watch is the app store rankings of various crypto apps. This comes from The Block and shows that over the last couple weeks, app downloads for Coinbase (COIN) and Robinhood (HOOD) have hit their highest levels since January. Lesser-known apps like Kraken and Crypto.com are catching on, too: 
Once you see these apps rank at the top of the charts, that’s your cue to start scaling out. And if you see a commercial for Coinbase during Super Bowl LX on Feb. 8, 2026, you’ll want to be at a full sprint towards the exits. With all this in mind, my advice to you is this: If you don’t already own bitcoin, but want to ride this train, look to the altcoins. We have a pretty strongly confirmed change in trend. But be mindful of the risks. I see this as a 6-10 month, extreme run that will end just like all the others: in a nasty bear market. You should be wary of searching outside the top 50 cryptos by market cap. And it’s worth freshening up on this piece I wrote some time ago that’s specifically about risks in this wild sector. And if that’s not your cup of tea, there’s still plenty of plays in stocks. Bitcoin miners, fintechs, and crypto proxies are all on the table – and will likely benefit over this same span of time. Switching gears, let’s check in on the U.S. consumer… If talking about bitcoin in October 2023 was one of my best calls, I should also talk about one of my worst. It was, in fact, it was the very first piece I ever wrote for TradeSmith Daily. In it, I was worrying about the state of U.S. consumers. High debt levels, low savings rates, and rising defaults all informed my view back then. But I think there may be something down in the spirals of American DNA that makes us stubbornly resilient when it comes to, well, most things… but especially finances. The savings rate is a bit lower today than it was then. Defaults are a bit higher. But one bright spot in this particular set of data is the slowing rate of growth in credit card balances: 
Credit card debt is still growing. Just nowhere near the annual pace it was back at the start of 2023. Two more wins for the American consumer came through on Thursday. For one, retail sales were surprisingly strong alongside shrinking unemployment claims. From Bloomberg: US retail sales saw a broad advance, tempering some concerns about a retrenchment in consumer spending. Meantime, applications for US unemployment benefits declined for a fifth straight week to the lowest level since mid-April, showing a solid job market. This is all good news to get pretty excited about. The U.S. economy is holding up remarkably well not just through the touch-and-go state of the global trade war, but also with historically high interest rates. The Trump administration must be having a hard time with this one. On one hand, they have to publicly be happy about low unemployment and strong consumer spending. On the other hand, they really want to see lower interest rates. Problem is, we happen to have a somewhat responsible Fed that doesn’t want to give even more sugar to a child that’s already bouncing off the walls, so to speak. I understand the frustration. High rates have been fine for just about everyone except the federal government, whose spending issues have put it on an unsustainable fiscal path. We correctly viewed the Fed’s 50-point rate cut in September as the “Third Mandate” made manifest. That has worked – as you can see below, the rate of growth in government interest expenditures has continued to shrink since that rate cut and in the most recent quarter, even went negative. 
There is, of course, much more to do. And that, along with the fact that the recent tax legislation is a massive stimulus package in thin disguise, is at least one key reason Trump is so obsessed with cutting rates. He needs to prove that his campaign of austerity and fixing the excesses of government were not empty promises, and the only way that happens is with lower debt costs. What this means for us as investors is whether or not the U.S. economy needs rate cuts, we should likely expect them anyway not long after Fed Chair Powell’s term as chair is up That’s likely to goose the prices of rate-sensitive sectors like real estate, discretionary, technology, and especially leveraged small-caps across this spectrum. But until then, there’s still a pretty heavy lid on all these areas, broadly speaking. Seasonality continues to be a boon and a threat… As stocks have climbed higher through July, we’ve been continuously updating you about the seasonal trends set to reverse near the start of August. The long story made short is that the next 8 trading days are seasonally very strong for the market. But what follows is the weakest three-month period of the entire year. We’ve been looking at the last 15 years of data for evidence of this trend, but it’s not the only way we can look at seasonality. The last 18 post-election year cycles show a very similar trend over the next few months: 
From August 1 to September 24, during post-election years going back to the Eisenhower administration, the S&P 500 has fallen more than half the time for an average return of -2.4%. But from now until then? Stocks are higher more than 72% of the time, a tack on another 1% on average. Now, we’re entering the strongest part of the month, followed by the weakest stretch of the year. Timing matters more than ever now. That’s why we built a whole system around our seasonality tools that helps you trade the “green days” when 5,000 stocks are historically most likely to surge. This breakthrough had 83% accuracy in our backtests and has already flagged moves like: - 111% gain in 10 days on Hasbro (HAS)
- 198% in 5 days on Analog Devices (ADI)
- 247% in 15 days on Intuit (INTU)
Now, if you want to know which stocks to ride through the end of the month and which to dump – to the day – then we’re hosting a special event that shows you exactly how to do it. Join us for a live event on Tuesday, July 22 at 10 a.m. Eastern all about these lucrative seasonality signals. Signing up for this webinar gets you access to a limited-time tool that lets you plug in all your favorite stocks and see how to trade them not just over this next week, but for the rest of 2025. Click here to reserve your spot and start using the system now. To building wealth beyond measure, 
Michael Salvatore
Editor, TradeSmith Daily (Michael Salvatore held positions in BTC, ETH, COIN, and HOOD at time of writing.) | 
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