major crypto analyst

There is no single indicator that can be used with high conviction in trading, irrespective of whether it is intraday or long-term.

There is a lot of hubris among traders who managed to make some money in trading due to supposedly using some indicator. This situation is not uncommon, it is usually luck rather than skill. Markets tend to operate in phases, they have a rhythm: from bull to bear to ranging ones. Some people who are fortunate enough to join the bull phase early by definition will end up making money. If you add here reckless leveraging and “diamond hands” - the returns can be pretty impressive. But once again - it is just pure survivorship bias. You see only the winners.

Survivorship bias - a tremendous psychological phenomenon that leads to making logical errors. The whole idea is this: you see some successful people and companies - you think that that is the way. Just emulate them and you will have the same results. But that is not true. For example, take Google. It is a trillion-dollar-value company, the prime example of success in IT and overall tech business. However, do you know how many companies failed in the early dot-com era, even in post- and pre-dot-com? Just for one company, Google, to succeed, there have been many that failed. The same for traders in bullish markets. Take for example the COVID times, in 2020 massive QE was announced, and money started to pour. There was one guy who made almost a million just from nothing, like several grand perhaps - that was his initial stake. And he was using this simple moving average indicator. And he was posting every single day his positions. Even if the trade went against him, he held and held. Eventually the bull market dragged him higher and higher. It was just pure luck. Nobody knew what would be the end of the trend. Yet the guy kept pyramiding. Good for him - he finished the year 2020 with massive returns. However, see what happened next. He continued to use the sample moving average in the next years. And he continued to have that “hold on no matter what” principle, and he used leverage. But as we already know, 2022-2023 was a bear market, and our guy was wiped out completely.

What is the moral of the above story? The learning point is not to rely blindly on one indicator. Moreover, even if the method works, there has to be a contingency plan, Plan B, in case things go sour, so as to evade disaster.

Please understand that I am not against indicators, quite the opposite. I believe that indicators have great utility in trading. They might be of great help to traders. However, they can't replace the whole decision-making process. They are part of the bigger system, not a single decisive factor in trading. Just bear with me,I will give some concrete examples below.

Now you asked about indicators primarily for intraday. Intraday trading has a broad meaning too. It is part of day trading - buying and selling the same asset within one day. For some intraday, it can be a 5-minute time frame, for some it can be holding for several hours, and for some, it can be mere seconds and minutes. Also, it depends on what trading style is used here: it can be pure event-driven, it can be pattern breakout, it can be earning season trading, or it might be anything else. There are many indicators actually, the most famous are:

Moving Average (SMA, EMA)

This indicator is one of the most popular. It basically works as a review of the past prices. The length parameter of Moving Average determines how many past bars’ prices to use. If we use a simple moving average, then, as the name suggests, it is just a pure mathematical average. If we take 5 MA, we take the past five prices, and the same logic applies for other bar lengths. But bear in mind, it is a backward-looking indicator. It means it needs to know what happened in the past to determine the current average price. It has no magic indication of what the future price will be. EMA has the same logic, but it uses a smoothing factor. to make the price less rough

-Relative Strength Index.

Great indicator that uses boundaries of 70 and 30, where an the indicaion of over 70 means an overbought zone, and below 30 it is oversold. The conventional logic implies that in an oversold territory, it is better to buy, and the vice versa logic applies for overbought.

-Stochastic Oscillator

Faster and more sensitive than RSI. Popular for range-bound markets

Bollinger Bands Price and volatility combined. Squeeze = low volatility (possible breakout)

ATR (Average True Range)

Measures the range of the price swings, average ones. It is great to use for stop-loss orders. Some use SL, which is not greater than ATR. And it makes sense, because higher value than ATR means higher volatility - thus, more unexpected events - you want to be guarded against that.

And many more indicators, noteworthy to mention: Ichimoku Cloud, Fibonacci Retracements, Volume Weighted Average Price, FAN principle, and more.

At PrimeXBT various indicators are possible to use. Also, do not forget that at PXTrader 2.0 (formerly known as Crypto Futures mode), it is TV charts, and from TV there are a big number of trading indicators that can be used. Just have a look at the picture above.

Possible ways to use indicators are to look with their help for breakouts from patterns. Aha! It is not just indicator but a combianation with patter recognition. Suppose you have identified a rectangle pattern, you see that the price goes to the lower boundary. Now, what you can do is to check RSI, if the RSI confirms the oversold zone, it might be a good entry point for a long trade. It can be the same for the right triangle breakout from horizontal bases. When placing a SL, just check the ATR, you can use a percentage of the ATR (higher or lower, depending on risk tolerance).

However, all these examples I have described are for illustration purposes only. Do not emulate anyone blindly, always do proper due diligence.
$SOL

I wish I had a magic formula that would tell me about the direction of the foreign exchange markets. This task has been puzzling many people. There are enormous amounts of both monetary and human capital spent to understand the dynamics of the financial markets. Complex financial systems with quantitative approaches are used by large institutions. Firms like Citadel, Caxton Associates, Jane Street, Optiver, and Bridgewater Associates, trading branches from the "Bulge Bracket" banks, employ numerous convoluted methods to find even a tiny inefficiency in the financial markets.
Just to give you an example, one large investment bank hired Garry Kasparov to assist with their investment decisions. It is interesting here because I bet that that bank used arcane mathematical models or AI-driven methods, while Kasparov is not fond of so-called AI systems when they operate in the “open-loop” model. In one of his interviews with Lex Friedman, he articulated that machines will not succeed in the “open-loop systems.” To elaborate here, by “open-loop” models he means the systems where the rules can not be strictly defined. He gave an example of self-driving cars that, despite their buzz and catchy phrase, have not yet gained popularity and mass adoption. Why? He claims that machines can’t be aware of that much to “know” what is around them. And he continued to give an example of chess, where there are finite possibilities of chess games and moves, the domain where simply a large computer with huge computational power has an edge over a human.
Well, I cannot disagree with Kasparov’s statement, indeed, if we take the financial markets, they are extremely open-loop. I mean, they are not determined by some simple set of formulae. However, there are inefficiencies in the markets, where despite the claims of the “Efficient Market Hypothesis,” it is possible to exploit them in one’s favor. But at the same time some inefficiencies might be simply temporary. Take, for example, the infamous case of the “Turtle Traders.” Richard Dennis used a very simple, mechanical set of rules to buy and sell a financial security. Those rules were made publicly available. However, it is not possible to make money with that system. Why? Well, it is because everyone knows about the method - it means that there is no edge, the edge is lost.
Does it mean that the financial markets are only for the giant financial corporations that have billions of dollars to invest? No, as you know, there are enough retail traders who elevated themselves from nothing. Some even started from ridiculously small sums like 500 or 1000 dollars and managed to amplify their trading stakes to millions. This all sounds inspirational, however, we also need to understand that it takes lots of preparation, analysis, tremendous discipline, and iron risk management.
In order to understand what methods can be used to directly assess the state of FX, we need to understand the inner mechanics of the market itself.
Trading foreign exchange markets started to gain popularity somewhere in the 1970s and 1980s. At those times there were hardly any trading desks that specialized only in the Forex market, usually there were some mid-sized proprietary trading firms whose strong traders used to buy and sell various securities. One of them was Salomon Brothers. In fact, one of the legendary traders - Bill Lipschutz - rose to prominence while working there as a forex trader. He was interviewed in one of the Jack Schwager “Market Wizards” books. And despite the fall of Salomon Brothers, he recalls those days at the firm as some of the best.
It is mistakenly believed that FX markets are controlled by huge banks and it is impossible to make money for a retail trader. This is, of course, not true. FX markets involve currency pairs, well, the pair of currencies that are tied to each other. It is built around currency pairs because one currency is always valued relative to another. A single currency by itself has no price.
It is not a surprise that I have written earlier that it was the 1970-80s times when FX becamse more popular. Why? Well, because Richard Nixon unpegged the U.S. dollar from gold on August 15, 1971. After that moment, the dollar did not promise to return a certain amount of gold to its holders. Its value started to be controlled by the FED. The backing of the US dollar is simply the US economy. But why are two currencies involved? Well, after that moment, the fixed exchange rate was abolished in many countries, and the floating nature was introduced.
It is base currency vs. quote currency. If we take the famous EUR/USD, we have EUR as the base and USD as the quote. If the pair rises, it means that the EUR got stronger relative to the dollar, if the opposite, then the EUR weakened relative to the dollar. Or the logic can be inverted, and it can be said that the dollar got weaker in the former case and stronger in the latter.
Now, the question is what affects the major trend of the currency pair? Well, it is no secret that central banks govern the fate of currencies. Therefore, understanding the macroeconomic situation is crucial.
The most notorious macroeconomic trader in the FX market is undoubtedly George Soros. He used his innate ability to understand the forces in the market and its overall implications. He famously shorted the British pound, an event that earned him the nickname “The man who broke the Bank of England.”
So, if we deal with macroeconomic activity, the following have to be watched carefully:
1.The central bank's interest rates. Expectations matter more than current rates. A trade has to carefully monitor any warnings from the FED, ECB, BoJ, RBA, and BoE.
2. Inflation, CPI, PCE. Inflation matters because of interest rates. Rising inflation → pressure to hike rates. Falling inflation → rate cuts
3. Economic growth (GDP, PMIs). Simply said, the economic growth is the demand for the currency, which is attractive for foreign investors with capital influx.
4. Labor market (especially for USD). Watch: Unemployment rate, Non-Farm Payrolls (US), Wage growth (average hourly earnings), Participation rate
5. Payment balance. Trade balance. Export balance.
6. Capital flows & risk sentiment
7. Commodity prices (for some currencies). For example, the Australian dollar depends on the copper price; the same is true for the Chilean peso. Also, crude oil might affect the currency a lot if the country is heavily dependent on it, like Russia.
8. Government debt and fiscal policy. Inner monetary and fiscal policy affect the central bank's decisions.
From all the above, it is clear that it is not an easy task to monitor all the above aspects, and perhaps, I have missed some of the other factors.
But if there are so many factors, how can it be possible for retail traders then? Well, one of the tactics that retail traders employ is so-called event-driven trading. It works like this: at a trading platform like Pocket Option ( see the figure above), you can select the economic calendar and see the incoming event. And if you combine the event release time with the preset technical analysis, it is possible to take advantage of the possible move at that event. Of course, it might involve a lot of volatility, however, if approached carefully, it can be quite profitable.
In the last Jack Schwager book, “Unknown Market Wizards,” there were interviews with some traders who trade exactly like that - event-driven method.
I have also mentioned the technical analysis, and if you read my blog, then you might know what I am talking about. Chart patterns can be used in conjunction with fundamental trading as described above. Some examples: suppose we have EUR/USD developing a persistent rectangle formation, and we are bullish on USD, so the FED’s hawkish announcement might be a trigger for the rectangle’s bottom to be penetrated, and we could simply short the pair.
Also, it depends on the time frame you will trade and try to predict the direction of the FX pair. Different periods can be used, from intraday minutes to daily and weekly, if you will try to hold pairs for longer periods.
Please note that trading markets, whether it is FX or stock or any other, is a risky endeavor, thus, consider making a thorough analysis before any investment or trading decision, none of the above written is an investment advice.
$ROSE

$BTC

Gold is no longer climbing quietly. With prices pushing toward the $4,900 level, the move has become impossible to ignore. But this rally isn’t being driven by inflation alone — or by a routine flight to safety.
According to recent analysis from Aakash Group, gold is being lifted by three powerful forces acting simultaneously — a combination rarely seen in modern financial history. Each factor alone would normally support higher prices. Together, they are reshaping how the market values gold entirely.
Force 1: The Greenland Tariff War and a New Geopolitical Reality
The first driver is geopolitical — and unusually direct.
President Donald Trump announced 10% tariffs on imports from eight NATO allies, including Germany, France, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, and Finland. These tariffs are scheduled to rise to 25% by June if negotiations fail.
The trigger is extraordinary: a demand for the “complete and total purchase” of Greenland.
This represents the U.S. applying economic pressure on its closest military allies over an Arctic territory with growing strategic and resource significance.
France has already urged the European Union to consider activating its Anti-Coercion Instrument, a legal tool that could authorize up to €93 billion in retaliatory tariffs against U.S. goods.
Markets reacted immediately. Gold climbed roughly 10% in the first three weeks of January, as investors began pricing geopolitical risk not as distant or hypothetical — but immediate and systemic.
Gold historically performs best when alliances fracture and trade rules become weapons. This situation fits that pattern precisely.
Force 2: The Federal Reserve Independence Crisis
The second force is institutional — and potentially more dangerous.
On January 9, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell related to renovation costs. Powell responded publicly, signaling growing political pressure on the central bank.
Soon after, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended the investigation, while Trump openly attacked Powell, stating he would “be gone soon.”
Powell is now tied to Supreme Court proceedings involving whether Trump can remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook — a case that directly challenges the political independence of the Federal Reserve.
Markets are no longer treating Fed independence as guaranteed.
When confidence in monetary governance erodes, the U.S. dollar weakens, and gold becomes a hedge not just against inflation — but against institutional instability itself.
This is not a rate-cycle story.
It is a credibility crisis.
Force 3: The Central Bank Gold Stampede
The third force is global and monetary.
China’s central bank has now completed 14 consecutive months of gold purchases, adding an estimated 30,000–40,000 ounces per month. These are strategic reserve accumulations, not tactical trades.
More importantly, analysts estimate China’s true gold holdings may be closer to 5,411 tonnes, far above the officially reported 2,304 tonnes.
At the same time, China launched mBridge with the UAE — a digital settlement system enabling cross-border trade without the U.S. dollar. This represents the early construction of a parallel monetary framework.
Western capital is moving in the same direction. In 2025 alone, gold ETFs recorded a record $89 billion in inflows, with the SPDR Gold Trust now holding over 1,073 metric tons, a three-year high.
These buyers aren’t chasing momentum. They are accumulating regardless of price — seeking protection, not speculation.
The Bigger Picture
Gold near $4,800–$4,900 is not pricing a single risk. It is pricing three structural shifts simultaneously:
The erosion of trans-Atlantic political cohesion
The politicization of monetary authority
The gradual emergence of a post-dollar reserve system
This is why major institutions are revising long-term forecasts.
JPMorgan has set a $5,000 gold target by Q4 2026
Goldman Sachs estimates that if just 1% of the $27 trillion U.S. Treasury market rotated into gold, prices would move well beyond $5,000
Calls for $5,000 gold overnight may be overstated. But reaching those levels over the next year is firmly grounded in capital flows, institutional behavior, and market structure.
Gold isn’t reacting to one shock.
It’s responding to a fundamental shift in the global financial order.
$XAU