I told 9-5 Traders when I was doing it, not after.
BTC spot at 62.5k. ETH spot at 1.73k. Both entered live in Discord, both starter size, both part of the staged re-entry I walked through in Friday's issue. Not a full position. Not a guess. A first step against a framework I have been tracking for months.
Both are in decent profit right now. BTC is trading a little over 64k, up roughly 3% from entry. ETH is trading near 1834, up close to 5%. I am not writing this to celebrate a green week. I am writing it because this is exactly the outcome a staged entry is supposed to produce. Small size, real information, no damage if it had gone the other way.
Options first, because this is the part I actually want to walk through in detail.
I closed two short put trades this week on the 2k challenge account.
Both were ETH puts, both expiring later this month, both sold as premium against a level I did not expect price to reach. One returned 78% on the premium collected. The other returned 80%. In dollar terms these were small, 25 and change on one, 21 and change on the other. I am not sharing these numbers to impress anyone. I am sharing them because the challenge account exists specifically to prove that small, boring, repeatable trades compound into something real over time. That account is now up 8% since I started it.
Eight percent is not a headline number. It is also not luck. It is what happens when you sell premium at levels you have already done the work to identify, size small enough that being wrong does not matter, and let each trade do exactly one job instead of asking it to make your whole month.
I keep the challenge account deliberately small for this exact reason. It is easy to talk about discipline in theory. It is a different thing to actually run a small account through real trades, real entries, real closes, and show the process live instead of just describing it after the fact. The size is the point. Anyone can look calm about a trade that barely moves the needle. The habits that build here are the same ones I use everywhere else, just visible at a scale where nothing hides.
Now the macro picture.
BTC broke its multi month uptrend line a few weeks back, the kind of break that gets people calling the top the moment it happens. Since then it has been doing something less dramatic and more useful. It found a level well below current price and held it. It bounced hard off that level, ran into a resistance shelf, pulled back, and is now sitting in the middle of that range, above the support that mattered and below the resistance that matters more.
That middle ground is not a signal by itself. It is a market deciding. I would rather sit in that ambiguity honestly than force a read onto a chart that has not actually resolved yet. What I am watching this week is which of those two boundaries gets tested first and how price behaves when it gets there.
ETH is telling a slightly cleaner story. It put in a real double bottom earlier this cycle, the kind of base that takes weeks to build and usually means something when it finally breaks. Since then it has been grinding higher in stages, and current price is now sitting right underneath a resistance band I have been watching for a while. This happens to be the exact kind of zone where I think about selling calls against spot ETH rather than just holding and hoping. Generate yield on the position while I wait to see if the zone actually holds or breaks.
I am not giving away the specific strike or the exact levels I am using for either chart in this issue. That detail matters, and giving it away for free defeats the entire point of doing the work. What I will say is this. Both BTC and ETH are sitting at genuinely interesting points on their charts right now, not in the middle of nowhere, and the next week or two should tell us a lot about which direction both want to go.
Zooming out past just these two charts, this fits the same story I have been tracking across the indicator framework and the altcoin divergence I wrote about last week. One leg of the reversal sequence trying to turn. Two altcoins showing real strength while others lag. A macro chart sitting on a decision point. None of these are separate stories. They are all the same market working through the same question at the same time, from different angles.
My plan for the week is simple and it is the same plan I laid out on Friday. Hold the starter positions I already have. Do not add on excitement alone. Wait for confirmation across more than one signal before increasing size. Keep selling premium at levels that make sense rather than chasing directional bets on charts that have not resolved yet.
This is not a market that rewards conviction shouted loudly. It rewards a plan followed quietly, week after week, regardless of how any single week goes.
In the premium issue this week I have the exact levels I am watching on both BTC and ETH, the specific zone I would use to sell calls against spot ETH if price gets there, a full breakdown of both closed options trades including entry, strike, and why I chose those specific levels, and what I am planning next on the 2k challenge account.
