Quick overview
- Bitcoin has surged to $85,250 after struggling around the $80,000 to $81,000 resistance for weeks.
- A significant liquidation event saw $612 million in total liquidations, primarily from short positions.
- The next resistance levels to watch are $87,000 to $88,000, with a potential path to $100,000 if cleared.
- The upcoming pullback will be crucial; maintaining support between $80,000 and $82,000 will confirm the breakout.
Bitcoin spent most of September bouncing off the same wall. The 200-day moving average, parked between $80,000 and $81,000, rejected every serious push higher. Traders tried it multiple times. It didn’t work. Then Monday happened, and suddenly bitcoin is at $85,250, up 4.4% on the day and 9% on the week, sitting above a level that had stopped it cold for weeks.
The move built from the $75,000 to $76,000 range and briefly tagged $86,600 before settling back slightly. The shorter moving averages are still sitting well below current price, between $72,000 and $78,000, but they’ve started turning up. Early sign, but the right one.
$87,000 to $88,000 is the next thing that needs to get cleared. That’s where resistance has been building. A break above it doesn’t leave much standing in the way before $90,000, and from $90,000 it’s a straight shot of about 11% to six figures. A few months ago $100,000 felt distant. Right now it doesn’t.
Look at the liquidation breakdown from the past 24 hours and you understand what actually drove this. Total bitcoin liquidations came in around $612 million. Of that, $535 million was shorts getting blown out. Longs only took $77 million of the pain. A squeeze did a lot of the heavy lifting here.
The positioning on exchanges backs that read. Overall long/short ratios on Binance and OKX are still barely below 1.0, meaning short accounts slightly outnumber longs across the broader user base. But the top traders on Binance are positioned very differently, with a long/short ratio near 2.27 in favor of longs. The people with the biggest books are on one side. Everyone else is still leaning the other way.
That disconnect is what gives this move more room. Short positions clustered near $87,000 to $90,000 become forced buyers if price gets there. That’s mechanical upside that doesn’t need sentiment to flip. What it does need, eventually, is real spot demand stepping in once the squeeze is done. RSI sitting in the mid-60s without being stretched yet suggests there’s still gas in the tank if buyers follow through.
The first pullback will tell you everything. Bitcoin holding $80,000 to $82,000 on a dip turns that old resistance into support and confirms this breakout is real. Losing it would put the whole setup back in question. That’s the level to watch.
Sophia Cruz
Financial Writer – Asian & European Desks
Sophia is an experienced writer, reporter and newsdesk member, mostly on the financial sectors. For the past 5 years Sophia has covered a wide variety of topics such as the financial markets, economics, technology, fin-tech and trading. Sophia has been a part of the FX Leaders team since 2017 and works on producing valuable content and information for traders of all levels of experience.
