Markets are emotional...put away your pen...lol
Many people are sleeping right now.
its funny you say that when the hourly volume levels for the last couple of hours are way about the historic average. Many people may be sleeping right now, but people who have an interest in protecting their bitcoin investment and/or playing this wild market gyration are buying and selling BTC at record levels for this market.
There was a very clear market signal that has been going on for the past week and a few days that a major correction was coming. It was in the shape of a parabola.
The reason we have charts like this is to make informed decisions about when to get in and out of markets. The market then gave a really good reversal signal, in fact it telegraphed it, which was great. It let me sell at damn near the top.
That was the head and shoulders pattern that showed up. It confirmed and then it was just a matter of staking out support levels and watching the depth of the market to see how low it would go.
Emotional people are also predictable people. That is why Technical Analysis of charts works so well in a free market.
Now here is this continuation pattern. Very important patter to understand. It was nice we didn't see a dead cat bounce. gave people a chance to recover from the cliff diving, but make no mistake, this pattern is indicating market indecision as a whole. It appears that the supply and demand curve has found and equilibrium, thus the circling around that drain type of gyration. That equilibrium is what creates the symmetrical triangle pattern in the chart. But we know that line isn't going to be flat, that patter is going to break up or down out of that triangle signaling momentum.
The reason it's known as a continuation pattern is because typically occurs after a sharp trend with building volume reaches an impasse. The volume starts to decrease as the price begins to gyrate closer and closer to the equilibrium. Then once the volume picks back up again, the trend continues in the same direction of the increase volume.
In this case, it would continue downward price breaking out of the triangles that my pen has drawn. In trend pattern studies you might read that something like 9/10 times the pattern breaks in the direction of previous momentum.
This means the price is setting up for people to short it, if that is possible.
So what you would do in this environment is look for an exit when price hits along the top of the triangle, and wait for the price to fall to a new support level before you buy back in.
In the odd event where the pattern breaks opposite your position, you are still in good shape because you would be able to in this case, buy as soon as the price breaks up and ride up to resistance.
It's a pretty strong pattern and probably one of the more consistent and obvious patterns.