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Buying crypto without getting hurt: how much to put in, how much to risk, where to keep it

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Hi trader,

the question I get asked most about crypto isn’t “what should I buy”.

It’s “how much should I put in?“

And I always answer with another question: how much are you willing to lose?

That’s where almost everyone stops. Some people laugh. Some answer “nothing, I’m not buying it to lose money”.

Well, the whole problem is in that answer.

Nobody buys to lose. But if you haven’t decided beforehand how much you can lose, you find out the number afterwards. And you risk finding it out from the market, on the worst day.

Last lesson we saw what moves the price. Today we get practical, and the basic rule is just one: first you decide how much you can lose, then how much you buy. Never the other way round.

Ok, vamos.

First of all: look at what it’s capable of

I’m not asking you to guess where it’s going. I’m asking you to look at where it has already been.

Chart of the bitcoin price in dollars from 1 October 2025 to 3 October 2026 on Coinbase: from the 126,296 dollar high on 6 October 2025 to the 57,718 dollar low on 1 July 2026, a 54% fall, with the 14% one day drop on 5 February 2026 highlighted in red
Bitcoin from 1 October 2025 to today, daily closes on Coinbase. In less than nine months it lost 54% from high to low, and on 5 February 2026 it gave up 14% in a single day.

On 6 October 2025, on Coinbase, bitcoin hit 126,296 dollars.

On 1 July 2026 it hit 57,718. Down 54%.

In between, on 5 February 2026, it lost 14% in a single day. And the next day it got back 12%.

I’m not telling you this to scare you. I’m telling you because these numbers are your account, if you put everything in.

If you’d bought at the top with all your capital, by July you’d have had less than half of it. And not because of a mistake in your analysis: just because that’s how bitcoin moves.

Size comes from risk, not from gut feeling

Let me explain it the way we do it on futures, because it works exactly the same.

One. Decide what slice of your capital you’re willing to lose if you’re wrong. A percentage, not a random number. How much it is, that’s your call: it depends on how much capital you have, what you need it for and how well you sleep at night. What matters is that it’s decided beforehand and written down somewhere.

Two. Decide where you’re wrong. Meaning the price at which your idea no longer holds. That’s the stop.

Three. Only now do you work out how much to buy: risk divided by the stop distance. If you measure the distance as a percentage, you get how much the position is worth; if you measure it in dollars per coin, you get how many coins.

Position sizing scheme: position equals risk divided by stop distance. With a 2% stop the position is 50 times the risk, at 5% 20 times, at 10% 10 times, and in all three cases if you are wrong you lose the risk you set
Same risk, three different stops. With the stop 2% from entry the position can be worth 50 times the risk, at 5% 20 times, at 10% 10 times. If you’re wrong you always lose the same amount: only how much you buy changes.

Look at the figure, because here’s the thing almost nobody has clear.

Risking a certain amount doesn’t mean buying that amount. With a tight stop you can buy more, with a wide stop you have to buy less. If you’re wrong, the loss is the same, plus fees and any slippage on the stop.

One limit: without leverage the position can’t be bigger than the capital you have. If the formula gives you a number bigger than your account, that’s not a green light for leverage: it means the stop is too tight or the risk too high.

And go back to 5 February. With a 2% stop you were out at the first breath that day, and the next day price had already got back 12%. With a wider stop you survive days like that, but you have to buy less. A tight stop lets you buy more, but on a market that does 14% in a day it gets hit for nothing. The ones who get wiped out are the ones who keep the big size and then widen the stop, or don’t set one at all.

And what if you buy with no stop, to hold? That’s a legitimate choice. But then the stop distance is the whole way down to zero. And that’s not a textbook hypothesis: the -54% you saw above isn’t the worst of it, between 2021 and 2022 bitcoin lost 77%, between 2017 and 2018 it lost 84%. So the question becomes: if it halves tomorrow, how much of my capital goes with it? That number has to be one you can lose without your life changing.

I’ve been doing this calculation by hand on futures for years. On crypto, with quantities full of decimals and the euro dollar exchange rate in the middle, doing it by hand is how you get it wrong. That’s why we built the Crypto Risk Manager: you enter capital, risk percentage, entry and stop, and it tells you how much to buy. If you use leverage, it also warns you when the liquidation price falls before your stop, meaning when the stop you’ve set will never get hit. It’s free, and it takes thirty seconds. A lot less than it takes to blow an account on a size picked on feel.

I won’t repeat myself on leverage: leverage and liquidations, how you get wiped out. I’ll just tell you that to buy a crypto you don’t need leverage. It’s for people who want to do more with the capital they have, and they pay for that more with the risk of getting out before they’d decided to.

Where you keep what you’ve bought

Size protects you from price. But price isn’t the only way to lose money with crypto.

Remember the distinction we’ve been carrying since the first lesson: the ledger is one thing, whoever guards your access to it is another. Nobody has managed to rewrite the bitcoin ledger so far. The ones that get hacked all the time are exchanges, custody services and keys.

If you leave your crypto on the exchange, what you have is a row in its database: it owes you coins. If the exchange goes bust, the problem becomes yours. I covered this properly in the exchange, the place where you buy.

And it doesn’t take a collapse. On 21 February 2025, according to the FBI, around 1.5 billion dollars in crypto was stolen from a big exchange. The blockchain had nothing to do with it: what got hacked was the system the exchange used to sign withdrawals from its own holdings. That time it said it had covered its customers. With FTX, which collapsed in November 2022, the first repayments, for small claims, started in February 2025. And they were calculated in dollars, at the price on the day of the collapse: if you had bitcoin, you got back what it was worth then plus interest, not the bitcoin.

If you send them to an address only you hold the keys to, on the ledger they stay yours and no exchange owes you anything anymore. But with the keys, all the responsibility passes to you. How not to lose them and how not to give them away is in keys and wallets.

Which of the two you choose is your business. But custody is a risk decision just like size, and it has to be made beforehand, not on the day everyone rushes to withdraw.

What you do starting tomorrow morning

Write down the percentage. How much of your capital you’re willing to lose on one trade. One line, before you open the exchange.

Decide the stop before the size. If you don’t know where you’re wrong, you don’t know how much to buy.

Decide who holds the keys before you buy. And if you leave your crypto on the exchange, do it knowing that what you have is a company’s promise.

Where we go next time

Last lesson of the series. We’ve put a limit on what price can take from you, and chosen who you trust with the keys. What’s left is the sneakiest thing of all: the scams that still work. Signatures that authorize someone else to drain your address, fake support, projects that vanish with the money.

How much should I put in is the wrong question. The right one is how much am I willing to lose, and you ask it before you click buy.

— tradingblog.itPosta su X

Back to the start.

To the people who answer “nothing, I’m not buying it to lose money” I always say the same thing.

Perfect. Then write down how much. Because the market will ask you for that number anyway.

Only, if you didn’t write it down, it picks it for you.

Suerte Amigo!

Tiziano Brunno

Tradingblog

Want to put your market reading to the test?

Compete and challenge other traders inside an Arena in a demo environment, with no real capital at risk. Discover the Performance Arena Events by The Thunder Trader.

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Disclaimer: purely informational and educational content. It does not constitute financial advice or an invitation to trade. Trading involves the risk of capital loss.

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What really moves the price of bitcoin: flows, derivatives, liquidations

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Hi trader,

I come from futures.

ES, NQ, DAX. Stuff with opening hours, a bell that opens and one that closes, and a weekly report telling you who is positioned on which side.

The first time I sat down to look at bitcoin with futures eyes, the question I asked myself was the most basic one: who is buying it, right now?

And the answer threw me.

A lot of the time, what pushes it is not people buying actual bitcoin. It’s contracts that don’t even deliver bitcoin.

The last lesson, stablecoins and who guarantees what, ended with a promise: now we look at the thing you really care about, what moves the price.

Ok, vamos.

First tap: flows

Since January 2024 you can buy spot bitcoin ETFs in the US. Let me explain it in two lines.

When the ETF trades above the value of the bitcoin it holds, or when a big client asks for shares, an authorized participant creates new ones. And in exchange real bitcoin goes into the fund: since July 2025 the SEC allows it to be delivered directly, before that it went through cash and the fund bought the bitcoin itself. When people get out, the opposite happens.

So a positive net flow means something concrete: somebody had to get hold of that bitcoin.

The numbers, as of 1 October 2026: since they launched, these funds have taken in, net of outflows, 57.7 billion dollars.

But the number that matters if you trade is the daily one. And it swings.

Bar chart of daily net flows into US listed spot bitcoin ETFs from 15 September to 2 October 2026: outflows in mid September, a 999 million inflow peak on 21 September, then shrinking inflows down to a 148.7 million outflow on 30 September
Daily net flows of the US spot bitcoin ETFs from 15 September to 2 October 2026. Amber for inflow days, blue for outflow days. The same tap goes from almost a billion in a single day to negative within seven sessions.

Monday 21 September 2026: almost a billion in, in a single day.

Wednesday 30 September: 148.7 million out.

In the first half of 2026, 5.4 billion net had left these funds, I told you about it here. In the third quarter, 6.36 billion came in.

Three things, before you fall in love with it.

The tap has opening hours. ETFs trade when the US stock market is open. Bitcoin doesn’t stop: it trades at night, at the weekend, at Christmas. When price moves on a Saturday, the ETF has nothing to do with it.

Flows can also chase price. If bitcoin rises for a week, it’s no surprise that more people get into the funds. In that case the flow didn’t push anything: price dragged the flow along behind it.

Not everything that goes in is a bet on higher prices. Some people buy the ETF and at the same moment sell a future, to pocket the difference between the two prices. They couldn’t care less about direction.

Second tap: derivatives

In August 2026, on centralized exchanges and counting all crypto, 891 billion dollars traded spot. On derivatives, 3,400 billion. That’s 79.3% of the total.

For every dollar of crypto actually bought or sold, almost four go round on contracts that deliver nothing.

On the left, August 2026 volume on centralised exchanges, 891 billion dollars spot against 3,400 billion in derivatives; on the right, the four steps of a liquidation cascade, with the 10 and 11 October 2025 record: over 19 billion liquidated in 24 hours
On the left, August 2026 volume on centralized exchanges: 891 billion spot against 3,400 billion on derivatives. On the right, the cascade loop: price drops, liquidations trigger, forced selling pushes price lower, and the next ones trigger.

The king of contracts is called the perpetual. Here’s what it is: a future with no expiry. On ES you roll over every three months, here you don’t, the position stays open until you close it. Or until it gets closed for you.

So how does its price stay glued to the real one? Through the funding rate. On the biggest derivatives exchange it’s paid every eight hours by default: if the rate is positive, longs pay shorts, if it’s negative, the other way round. And the rate goes up when the contract trades above the spot price. That money moves from one trader to another, the exchange doesn’t keep it.

Translated for us futures people: funding is a positioning thermometer that updates every eight hours. It doesn’t tell you who is positioned the way the COT does, it tells you how much leveraged buyers are willing to pay. If it’s high and positive, there’s a queue on the buy side, and that queue is paying to stay in line.

The other number is open interest, the contracts open at that moment. At the end of August 2026, on derivatives exchanges and counting all crypto, it was worth 101 billion dollars. Every open contract has two people inside it, a long and a short, and sooner or later they’ll have to get out. By choice, or not.

Third tap: the ones who get out without deciding to

I’ve already written properly about leverage and liquidations, and I won’t do it all again here: leverage and liquidations, how you get wiped out.

On ES, above an obvious high, sit the stops of the shorts. Price gets there, the stops become buy orders, price jumps again. You know the drill.

On bitcoin it’s exactly the same thing, with three differences: leverage is much higher, the market never closes, and you don’t decide the last stop: the exchange triggers it when your margin runs out, and it’s called a liquidation.

On 10 and 11 October 2025, according to CoinGlass, positions worth more than 19 billion dollars were liquidated in 24 hours, around 1.6 million accounts. The biggest since records began.

And it’s probably an undercount: the biggest derivatives exchange, in its public feed, reports at most one liquidation per second per contract. The others in that second don’t show up.

That day the fuse was lit by a piece of news, the tariffs announced on China. But much of the drop wasn’t done by people with an opinion: it was done by people forced to sell.

And above it all, the weather

The three taps explain the how. The why, sometimes, sits outside crypto.

Bitcoin reacts to macro like a risk asset: rates, the dollar, liquidity. But not like a switch. After the rate hike of 16 September 2026, which on paper takes water away from the taps, bitcoin ETFs had their strongest week of inflows since October 2025.

Macro tells you what the weather is like. It doesn’t tell you where the boat is going.

I wrote about what the Fed hike of 16 September meant and about what a strong dollar does to your trades in the market pieces.

And here’s a tip from someone who’s been burned on leverage: a big US data release moves bitcoin too, and if it catches you on high leverage without you knowing it was due, you pay for the liquidation. The macro calendar with the impact of every event is free inside Thunder Desk. Five minutes before opening a position, not after.

What you do starting tomorrow morning

Read flows with the date and in proportion. A billion in a day makes headlines. Three days later it can be the opposite.

Before getting in, check funding and open interest. If funding is high and open interest keeps rising, there’s a lot of leverage paying to stay open, and the cascade already has fuel in the tank.

Remember that at the weekend the ETF tap is closed, the derivatives one isn’t. When the US stock market is shut, what’s left moving price is the exchanges, and there the heavy lifting is done by leveraged contracts.

Where we go next time

Next time we get practical: buying without getting hurt. How much to put in, how much to risk, and where to keep what you’ve bought.

The price of bitcoin, a lot of the time, is not set by people buying actual bitcoin. It’s set by people holding leveraged contracts open, and above all by people forced to close them.

— tradingblog.itPosta su X

Let me close with the thing that stuck with me from that first time.

I thought I’d find a new market, with new rules.

I found the same market I already know: positioning, leverage, stops.

Just without the closing bell.

Suerte Amigo!

Tiziano Brunno

Tradingblog

Want to put your market reading to the test?

Compete and challenge other traders inside an Arena in a demo environment, with no real capital at risk. Discover the Performance Arena Events by The Thunder Trader.

Discover The Thunder Trader →

Disclaimer: purely informational and educational content. It does not constitute financial advice or an invitation to trade. Trading involves the risk of capital loss.

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Bitcoin and ethereum are not two versions of the same thing

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Hi trader,

for a while I bought ethereum for a reason that now makes me laugh: it cost less.

Bitcoin was up there, ethereum a few thousand, and in my head the reasoning worked: this one is expensive, that one still has to catch up.

It was not a thesis.

It was me reading a price badly.

A thesis is a sentence you can write on a piece of paper and that somebody can take apart. “It costs less so it will go up” cannot be taken apart by anybody, because it does not say anything.

This is the lesson that made me get it. If you missed the last one, the exchange, go and read it: that one shows you where you buy. This one shows you what you buy.

Ok, vamos.

The difference they tell you about, and that has not held up this past year

The version going around is simple. Bitcoin is scarce, ethereum is not. One has a ceiling of 21 million written in stone, the other can be created forever. End of story.

So let us go and look at how much of each actually got created.

In the twelve months to 16 September 2026, the supply of bitcoin grew by 0.82%.

Ethereum’s grew by 0.81%.

Practically the same number. Whoever held one and whoever held the other got diluted by the same amount.

Chart of ethereum supply from September 2022 to September 2026: it falls below the starting level, bottoms out in early April 2024, then climbs back and from 5 February 2025 stays steadily above that level
Ethereum’s supply from the switch to proof of stake to today. The low is in April 2024, since February 2025 it has been back above the starting level and has not gone below it again.

And if you look at the pace of the last thirty days, ethereum is even slightly higher: 0.87% annualised.

So the difference that counts is not that one. If it were that one, this past year there would have been no difference at all.

The real difference is who decides that number

In bitcoin the number is written down. Today 3.125 new bitcoin every block, and every 210,000 blocks it halves. Anybody with a calculator can tell you how many bitcoin will exist in 2100.

The next time it halves is at block 1,050,000. In mid September 2026 there were around 82,500 blocks to go, and at that pace we land somewhere around April 2028. Note how I wrote it: “around”. You count in blocks, not in days, and anybody who hands you the exact date with the time on it is selling you a precision that does not exist.

And that rule does not hold because somebody promised it. It holds for the reason we saw in the first lesson: everybody has their own copy of the ledger, and everybody enforces the rules on their own account. Changing them takes more than somebody big wanting it, almost everybody has to go along.

2026 gave us the proof. On 8 August a proposal to change the rules, BIP-110, reached the stage where miners have to say yes or no. It picked up 2.53% against a threshold of 55%. And that 55% is only the threshold miners signal with: the rules are then enforced by whoever verifies the transactions, which is yet another set of people. That is why the chain trying to break away broke away on its own instead of dragging bitcoin along with it: it produced two blocks in eight hours and stopped there. Bitcoin’s core rules have not changed since November 2021.

Keep it in mind though, because it cuts both ways: whoever sells you “immutable” is selling you “it does not adapt” in the same package.

In ethereum that number is the balance of two forces

Here there is no ceiling, and it is not a detail to be hidden: it is simply a different design.

On one side the protocol creates new ETH to pay whoever keeps the network standing. How much depends on how much ETH is put up as a guarantee. In mid September 2026 that is 43.1 million, meaning 35% of the total, and there are another 1.85 million queuing to get in, with over a month of waiting.

On the other side the network destroys a slice of the fee on every transaction.

The balance between the two can go either way, and it depends on how much the network gets used. Congested, expensive network: more gets destroyed than created, supply falls. Smooth, cheap network: more gets created than destroyed, supply rises.

And this is the part that is worth the whole lesson on its own.

In March 2024 an upgrade made it almost free for second level networks to lean on the main one. And the point is not only that people moved over there: it is that those networks, which used to pay the main one a steep bill to park their data on it, have paid a fraction of that ever since. In mid September 2026 they do 62 times the operations of the main network, and on those networks a transfer costs less than a cent.

Result: on any ordinary day in September 2026 around forty ETH get destroyed on the main network, against an average of 2,481 a day since the mechanism has existed.

Ethereum’s supply hit its low in early April 2024. Since 5 February 2025 it has been back above the level it was at on the day the way it works changed, and it has not gone below it again.

Anybody who bought in 2022 after being told supply was going to shrink owns a smaller slice of the network today than they did then.

And watch out, because the balance has two sides and the other one moved in the meantime too: the ETH put up as a guarantee went from around 31 million in the spring of 2024 to over 43 million today, and the more of it is put up, the more the protocol creates. Supply went back to rising for two reasons pushing the same way, less destruction and more issuance. In 2023, with the network congested and far less ETH put up as a guarantee, the balance really did flip. Today the bar is higher, because the issuance you have to beat is the one coming from over 43 million ETH put up and no longer the one coming from 31.

It is not that somebody moved the goalposts. It is that the shrinking was never a guaranteed property of the system, it was a consequence of the traffic jam. The mechanism that the story said would shrink supply only works while the network is congested: when the network started running well, that mechanism nearly stopped.

Two jobs means two different ways of being wrong

Table comparing bitcoin and ethereum across four rows: who decides how much gets created, what it depends on, what the thesis of whoever buys it is, and what breaks it
The two jobs side by side: who decides how much gets created, what it depends on, what moves the price and what breaks the thesis.

Bitcoin is an issuance rule nobody can change, on a network that does no other job for a living. If you buy it, your thesis is that the rigidity is worth something. What breaks it is flows, meaning who buys and who sells: as of 16 September 2026 the US spot bitcoin ETFs are in net outflow of around two billion dollars year to date, and about what ETF flows really say I have already written here.

Ethereum is a network that charges for being used. If you buy it, your thesis is that the use grows and that the value stays attached to it. What breaks it is that use no longer passing through there, or passing through and paying a fraction of what it used to, which is exactly what happened.

Two instruments, two theses, two different things to watch. It is not the same position in two sizes.

What neither of the two is

Bitcoin is not insurance against central banks. In 2026 the Fed held the hard line and on 16 September it raised rates, the first hike in more than three years. Bitcoin, in the same year, fell. It behaves like a risk asset tied to how much liquidity is going around, not like an insurance policy that is immune to it.

Ethereum is not a share with a coupon. The protocol yield has dropped to 2.59% a year, and the BlackRock fund that actually puts it up as a guarantee passes 1.45% a year on to investors (figure as of 16 September 2026). The difference is not all fee, and that is the interesting part: a slice is taken by the fund and by whoever does the work for it, another is simply ether the fund keeps free, without putting it up as a guarantee, so it can pay back whoever walks out. And meanwhile the underlying, year to date, is down double digits. A yield of 1.45% a year, on something that is down more than ten times that in nine months, is not a coupon, it is a fig leaf.

And there is a short circuit: the more capital goes in as a guarantee chasing that yield, the more the protocol creates, and the less it pays everybody already inside. The dividend waters itself down as the shareholders turn up.

What you do from tomorrow morning

Write the thesis before you buy. One single line: “I am buying it because…”. If the line is “because it costs less than the other one”, that is not a line, that is what I used to do.

Ask yourself what would break it. For one it is flows, for the other it is how much the network gets used. They are two things you look at in two different places, and neither of the two is looked at on the price chart.

Do not size them the same just because they sit in the same folder. They are two jobs, and in 2026 the second moved a lot more than the first, in both directions.

Where we go next time

So far we have seen the ledger, the keys, the place where you buy and the two main things you buy there. Next time it is the turn of the ones that promise never to move: stablecoins, and above all who guarantees what.

The difference between the two is not how much of each gets created. It is that in one that number is written down, and in the other it is the result of how the network gets used.

— tradingblog.itPosta su X

Let me close with the thing that changed my mind.

It was not a chart.

It was realising that of one of the two things I had in my portfolio I could not say, in a single sentence, why on earth it should be worth anything.

And if you cannot say it, you do not have a position.

You have a hope with money inside it.

Suerte Amigo!

Tiziano Brunno

Tradingblog

Want to put your market reading to the test?

Compete and challenge other traders inside an Arena in a demo environment, with no real capital at risk. Discover the Performance Arena Events by The Thunder Trader.

Discover The Thunder Trader →

Disclaimer: purely informational and educational content. It does not constitute financial advice or an invitation to trade. Trading involves the risk of capital loss.

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What a blockchain is, without the hype

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Hi trader,

let me start with a confession that makes me look like an idiot.

I bought my first crypto without the faintest idea of what a blockchain was.

I knew it was going up. That was enough.

It is like driving for years without knowing there is an engine under the bonnet: as long as everything works, you don’t need to know. The day it stops in the middle of the road, though, you are the guy standing there waiting for somebody to explain what happened.

So this piece starts a series. Eight lessons, one a week, Monday morning, from the ground up.

No formulas. No untranslated jargon. Only the things that, if you don’t know them, sooner or later cost you money.

Ok, vamos.

The problem somebody was trying to solve

Forget the word blockchain for a second and think about something banal: how do you send a hundred euros to a friend?

You go to the bank, or you open the app. And the bank does exactly one thing: it writes on a ledger that you have a hundred euros less and your friend has a hundred more.

Nothing physical moves. A line gets updated.

Which means whoever holds the ledger is in charge. They can freeze you, they can get it wrong, they can decide that today you are not a likeable person.

The question somebody asked was: can you keep a ledger without there being an owner of the ledger?

A blockchain is the answer to that question. That is all it is.

What it is, in one line

It is a public ledger, copied identically onto thousands of computers around the world, that anyone can read and nobody can correct on their own.

Read the three parts again, because they are the whole lesson: public, copied, not correctable.

There is no safe inside it. There are no digital gold coins parked somewhere. There are lines, exactly like at the bank.

The difference is who keeps them and how they agree with each other.

Why it cannot be rigged

Here is the most common misunderstanding, and I fell for it too: people think it is secure because it is “encrypted”.

That is not the reason. The reason is far more agricultural.

First: it is copied. If I edit my copy of the ledger to give myself a thousand bitcoin, my version no longer matches the other thousands in circulation. When the network compares, mine gets thrown out like a fake note among ten thousand real ones. Nobody needs to catch me: it catches itself.

Second: it is chained. Transactions get grouped into blocks, and every block carries inside it the fingerprint of the previous one. It is like a stack of sheets where every sheet has the exact summary of the sheet below written at the top.

Now try changing a line on a sheet from three months ago.

That sheet’s fingerprint changes, so the sheet above it no longer adds up. And so neither does the one above that. To make the lie work you would have to redo every sheet that came after, while the rest of the world keeps stacking new ones faster than you can.

Two chains of four blocks compared: on top the intact chain, where the fingerprint written in each block matches the previous one, below the same chain with one line edited in block 2, where the fingerprint changes and every following block no longer adds up
A chain of four blocks, each carrying the fingerprint of the previous one. Below, the same chain with one line edited in the second block: the fingerprint no longer matches and every following block becomes invalid.

That is why it is called a chain of blocks. For once, the name says exactly what the thing does.

Security is not in the secret. It is in the repetition and the comparison.

And now the bill

This is the part the dream sellers skip, and it is the one that explains half of what you see happening.

Keeping thousands of copies of the same ledger, and making them agree continuously, is monstrously inefficient.

The ceiling can be raised, and every so often they do raise it. But the underlying price stays: you pay in slowness and in fees what you save in trust.

Look at the numbers, they explain it better than a thousand words.

Bitcoin handles roughly 7 transactions per second, and a new block comes out about every ten minutes.

Ethereum, on its base layer, sits around 25, already double what it was two years ago because the per block ceiling was raised.

Card networks chew through more than ten thousand per second on average, and far more at peak.

These are August 2026 numbers: this stuff ages fast, so take them with the date attached.

Comparison between the bank ledger, a single copy held by one owner, and the blockchain ledger, dozens of identical copies constantly compared, with transactions per second in August 2026 underneath: about 7 for bitcoin, about 25 for ethereum, more than ten thousand for the card networks
Comparison between the bank’s ledger, a single copy held by one owner, and the blockchain’s ledger, thousands of identical copies compared with each other. Underneath, transactions per second: about 7 for bitcoin, about 25 for ethereum, more than ten thousand for the card networks.

These are not numbers meant to say “blockchain is rubbish”. They are numbers to tell you that it is a tool with a specific job, and that job is not buying coffee.

You use a ledger with no owner when the owner is exactly the problem you want out of the way. For everything else, a credit card works perfectly well and costs less.

The three things that become useful tomorrow

Fine, so what changes in practice for you, someone who maybe just buys the stuff?

One. Now you know why fees swing. On bitcoin space in a block is limited and only one comes out every ten minutes. When there is a queue an auction decides who gets in, and whoever pays more per byte taken up goes first, not whoever pays more in absolute terms. On ethereum the mechanism is different, the base price is set by the protocol, but for you the substance is the same: when there is traffic you pay more.

Two consequences worth money. First: the fee does not depend on how much you send. Moving ten euros and moving ten million costs the same, because you pay for the weight of the transaction, not the value. Second: the network fee is not set by the exchange, but the withdrawal fee it charges you is another thing entirely, often fixed and often far higher than the real cost. Go and check that one.

Two. Now you know why that transfer says “pending”. It is not travelling anywhere. It is in a queue, waiting for somebody to slot it into a block.

Three, and this is the most important one of all. A confirmed transaction cannot be reversed. There is no complaints department. If you get scammed, if you click the wrong thing at two in the morning, or if you send on the wrong network, that money is simply gone.

On a single wrong character you are actually covered: addresses have a check code inside them and the wallet stops you before it sends. On the network, no. When you withdraw from an exchange a dropdown asks you which network to send on, and getting that dropdown wrong is the number one way a beginner burns money on their first transfer.

The very same property that makes the ledger impossible to rig, short of holding more computing power than the rest of the network put together, makes it impossible to correct when you are the one making the mistake.

And here is a distinction almost nobody makes: what cannot be rigged is the ledger. Everything sitting on top of it and around it, exchanges, wallets, contracts, bridges between chains, gets broken into regularly. When you read about an exchange being cleaned out, it is not the blockchain that gave way.

In trading, that is the one line in this whole piece that can save you real money.

Where we go next time

If the ledger has no owner, the next question comes by itself: how does the ledger know that a line was written by you and not by me?

That is where keys come in, and it is next week’s lesson. It is also the one where you find out what “not your keys, not your coins” actually means, a sentence everybody repeats and few have understood.

If instead you already want a look at what moves the price of this stuff, I wrote about it in bitcoin and ETF flows, which is a different planet from this lesson but it is where these conversations end up.

A blockchain is not secure because it is secret. It is secure because it is copied, and that same copying is why it is slow and expensive.

— tradingblog.itPosta su X

Let me close with the thing I repeat to myself every time somebody tries to sell me the word blockchain as if it were magic.

It is not magic. It is an accounting ledger with a common sense rule inside it: if many people hold it and compare it constantly, nobody can rewrite it in secret.

Everything else, decentralised finance, tokens, stablecoins, sits on top of that one line.

And when somebody explains the stuff on top without ever having explained this, it is usually because they have something to sell you.

Suerte Amigo!

Tiziano Brunno

Tradingblog

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Huge dim reservoir: a dark silent torrent pours out through a breach in the wall, while from a small pipe on the opposite side a thin thread of glowing amber liquid trickles in, tiny by comparison

The flip happened, just not where you were looking

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Hi trader,

back in mid July I left you with an open question.

Is Ethereum the unlucky brother who missed the train, or a compressed spring ready to snap?

Well, part of the answer has arrived. And as usual it did not arrive where we were all looking.

The headline you read

For the first time since they exist, ETFs on ether collected more in a month than ETFs on bitcoin.

The headline has been going around for weeks, in English and in Italian, almost always with the same word: flip.

And it is true. It is not a hoax, the data is there.

The problem is that the headline stops there, and the number keeps going.

Now let’s open the number up

July 2026. Here are the two figures, side by side.

Ether ETFs: 365 million dollars of net inflows.

Bitcoin ETFs: 205 million.

A flip, indeed. Now look at the two labels nobody put underneath.

Those 365 million are ether’s best month since its ETFs exist, meaning since July 2024.

Those 205 million are bitcoin’s worst month since its ETFs exist.

Bar chart of July 2026 net inflows: ether ETFs at 365 million dollars, their best month since July 2024, against bitcoin ETFs at 205 million, their worst month ever
The two bars of July 2026 net inflows, ether ETFs at 365 million against bitcoin ETFs at 205 million, with the two labels underneath: for ether it is the best month ever, for bitcoin the worst ever.

Read that sentence again, because everything is in there.

One product’s record beat the other product’s all time low.

It is not the Ferrari that overtook the McLaren down the straight. It is the McLaren that stopped in the pits, and the Ferrari, going at its own top speed, found itself in front.

It is still an overtake. But if you bet on the driver for the wrong reason, next lap you get surprised.

And the price, what does it say?

Here comes the part I actually care about, because it is the part that touches your account.

If flows are in charge, and ether won the month on flows, ether should be flying.

Ether, in mid August, sits just above 1,900 dollars.

The 2025 peak was around 5,000.

Bitcoin meanwhile sits around 64,000, against a high of 126,080 reached in October 2025.

So the flow won and the price did not notice.

That is not a freak event, and it is exactly the same family of things we have been talking about on this blog for a month. What moves your chart often is not on your chart, and when you finally manage to see it, you find out it is smaller than they told you.

The reason is banal: proportions

Three hundred and sixty five million dollars sound like a lot because we reason with our salary in mind.

On ether’s market, which capitalises hundreds of billions, that is a tap. It is not a dam.

There are single ugly sessions where more value than that moves on ether in a few hours.

So the right question is never “how much came in?”.

It is “how much came in compared to what?”.

And here is the number nobody made a headline out of, which is by far the biggest in the whole story.

The real number, the one with no headline

In the first half of 2026 bitcoin ETFs lost 5.4 billion dollars net.

It is the first half year in the red since they exist, meaning since January 2024.

Assets under management fell from over 70 billion to roughly 55 by the end of June.

Scale comparison between the 365 million dollars collected by ether ETFs in July 2026 and the 5.4 billion net that left bitcoin ETFs in the first half of the same year: the first bar is fifteen times smaller
Scale comparison between the 365 million collected by ether ETFs in July and the 5.4 billion net that left bitcoin ETFs in the first half of 2026. The first bar is fifteen times smaller.

Look at the figure and hold on to that proportion, because it is worth more than ten articles.

The “flip” worth 365 million is fifteen times smaller than the river that had been flowing out of the other side in the meantime.

One made the news. The other did not.

And it always works that way, by the way: the news is the rare event, the big number is the boredom nobody reports.

Where the flip is actually real

Now let me tell you the one thing in this piece you can use.

If you take the price of ether and divide it by the price of bitcoin, you get the famous ETH/BTC ratio. It is the clean way of asking which of the two is doing better, without the dollar dirtying your reasoning.

That ratio, back in May, sat around 0.024.

It now sits around 0.030.

There is your flip. It is there, not in the dollar price.

Ether gained roughly a quarter against bitcoin, and over the same period it lost value against the dollar. The two things sit together perfectly well, because they are two different bets.

And this is the real operational lesson, which has nothing to do with crypto and everything to do with any market you touch:

if you buy A because you think it will beat B, the right bet is A against B, not A against the dollar.

Whoever went long ether against bitcoin in May was right and took it home.

Whoever went long ether and nothing else had the exact same insight, was right on the thesis, and lost money anyway.

If one sentence survives this article, make it that one.

The explanation going around, and how much I buy it

The people who do this for a living tell it roughly like this: whoever sells bitcoin ETFs is selling exposure to a store of value that was not storing value, while whoever buys ether ETFs is buying an infrastructure that yields something, between 2 and 2.6 per cent net from staking, and on which stablecoins settle.

It is a coherent explanation. I quite like it too.

But let’s agree on what it is: it is a narrative that fits the data well, not a proof.

Narratives that fit the data well are the most dangerous ones out there, because they look like understanding when they are only telling the story backwards. If the ratio goes back to 0.024 tomorrow, all of us, me included, will find an equally elegant reason to explain it.

And August?

I am not going to comment on August, and I’ll tell you why.

In the first week of the month bitcoin ETFs collected over 750 million.

In the week around mid August almost 390 million left.

Two opposite headlines, both of them true, eight days apart.

Anyone quoting you a single week to prove that money is coming in, or going out, is picking the week that suits them.

It is the exact same flaw as the statistic I was talking about on Wednesday about levels: a figure without the period it was built from is not data, it is a position dressed up as data.

If you want to watch flows, watch them by month and by half year. Below that threshold it is noise, and noise makes you enter badly.

What I actually do with it

Not much, and let me be honest about it.

ETF flows are slow context. They tell you who is quietly accumulating over quarters, not whether you buy or sell tomorrow morning.

Asking flows for timing is like asking the clock in your living room what the weather is like outside.

What does change things, if you touch the crypto world at all, is size. Because here the “worst month ever” and the “best month ever” sit inside the same quarter, and the volatility behind those headlines is the same one that liquidates you at night while you sleep.

If you trade this with leverage, do the size calculation before you enter and keep it small: I put the Crypto Risk Manager online exactly for that, it is free and it tells you in ten seconds how much you can afford to be wrong by.

It is not the tool that makes you money. It is the one that keeps you at the table long enough for your thesis, if it is right, to have the time to become right.

Let me close where I opened

In July the question was: unlucky brother or compressed spring?

Today’s honest answer is a spring that is loading, but only slightly, and against bitcoin, not against the dollar.

The flip on flows is real and it is the first time. But it happened at all time lows for both of them, inside a half year in which billions left the sector, and the dollar price did not even wave at it.

If you want the full picture, the July piece on ether still stands on its premises, and the one on bitcoin and ETF flows is the frame right before this one.

An overtake at the lows of both is not a race won. It is a race where only one of the two stopped running.

— tradingblog.itPosta su X

And the moral, which is always the same one since I started writing on this blog.

Headlines give you the verb. Numbers give you the subject and the object.

If you only read the verb, you know something happened and you know neither to whom nor how much, and that is the stuff you go and open positions with.

Suerte Amigo!

Tiziano Brunno

Tradingblog

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Disclaimer: purely informational and educational content. It does not constitute financial advice or an invitation to trade. Trading involves the risk of capital loss. Flow data quoted is current as of 18 August 2026.

Red liquidation cascade: 253 million in leveraged positions closed by force

Leverage and liquidations: how you get wiped out

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Hey trader,

let me tell you how you burn 253 million dollars in a single day.

You don’t need an epic crash, a bad headline is enough. Middle East tensions came back, crypto went down with the rest of the risk-off, and in a few hours 253 million dollars of leveraged positions were wiped out.

The real question isn’t “why did it drop”. It’s: why did so many people blow up all at once? The answer has a name, and it’s leverage.

Leverage, explained without the jargon

Let me keep it simple. Leverage is a loan the exchange gives you to trade with more money than you have. You put in 100, with 10x leverage you move 1,000. If it goes up, you earn as if you had 1,000. Nice, right?

Hold the celebration. Leverage cuts both ways. If the market goes against you even a little, you have to cover that loan. And if your margin isn’t enough anymore, the exchange doesn’t call you and doesn’t apologize: it closes your trade for you. That’s liquidation. With 10x leverage a 10% move against you is enough, actually a touch less because the exchange closes a moment earlier to protect itself, and you’re out. With 50x leverage, do the math yourself.

The avalanche: why everyone blows up together

Here’s the part almost nobody explains. When the first wave of liquidations hits, those are forced sales. And forced sales push the price even lower. A moment later the second wave hits, pushing it down again. And so on.

It’s called a liquidation cascade, an avalanche. It’s not the market that “decided” to crash. It’s thousands of leveraged trades dragging each other down the cliff. Those 253 million are the value of the positions closed by force, not money burned one to one, but the mechanism is exactly that. And mind you, that wasn’t even one of the really bad days: in real crashes we’re talking billions. Picture the landslide.

How not to end up on the list

Little theory and a lot of practice. I won’t tell you “don’t use leverage”, you wouldn’t listen anyway. I’ll tell you how not to get wiped out:

  • Keep your leverage low. The difference between 3x and 50x isn’t “more courage”, it’s how close you’re walking to the edge of the cliff.
  • Size the position on the risk, not on the dream. First you decide how much you’re willing to lose, then you calculate the size. Never the other way around.
  • Always set your stop. Your own stop, decided with a cool head, beats the liquidation decided by the exchange.
  • Don’t enter with leverage before a big piece of news. The Middle East doesn’t send a warning.

Leverage doesn’t make you a better trader, it only makes you faster, for better and for worse. And if you don’t yet have a method that works without leverage, leverage only gets you to the wall sooner.

The difference between who blows up and who stays standing

Back to those 253 million, because there’s a twist. A good chunk of those people didn’t get liquidated because of a bad analysis, they got liquidated because they walked in blind. They didn’t know geopolitical tension was in the air, they didn’t know where the big positioning sat, they didn’t know the zones where price usually reacts.

Here’s the point: the line between who gets wiped out and who takes the day home almost always runs right there, through how much you see before you enter. The problem is that this data is scattered across twenty different places, often behind a paywall and in insider jargon.

That’s why we built Thunder Desk, and I’ll say it straight: if you trade with leverage and you don’t have a tool like this in front of you, you’re driving down the highway with your eyes closed. In one place, free, you’ll find the macro calendar with the real impact of every event (so you see the next bad headline coming), the positioning of commercials and speculators from the COT reports, gamma exposure on the S&P and Nasdaq, and the zones of interest on the DAX, ES, NQ and Dow. No noise, just data.

Create your account, open it five minutes before you trade, and the difference between you and those 253 million, you make it right there.

Stop trading blind

Macro calendar, COT, gamma exposure and zones of interest on the DAX, ES, NQ and Dow. Free, in one place. No noise, just data.

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When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.

— Warren BuffettPosta su X

That’s it from me. If you know someone playing with fire at 50x leverage, send them this article: you might save them the funeral of their account.

Suerte Amigo!
Tiziano Brunno Tradingblog

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Disclaimer: purely informational and educational content. It does not constitute financial advice or an invitation to trade. Trading involves the risk of capital loss.

Ethereum, the Brother Left Behind: Can It Still Catch Up?

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🤓 Nerd Mode

While Bitcoin grabs all the spotlight, the spot ETFs and the “digital gold” narrative, Ethereum has been left behind. And not by a little. The ratio between the price of Ethereum and that of Bitcoin, the famous ETH/BTC ratio, has been sitting near its multi-year lows for months.

The question everyone is asking is a single one: is it the loser brother who missed the train, or a compressed spring ready to snap? Let’s answer without picking sides.

Why Ethereum fell behind

It is not bad luck, there are precise reasons. Bitcoin has a story an institutional investor understands in ten seconds: limited supply, “digital gold”, store of value. It is a simple narrative, and it is precisely that simplicity that attracted the spot ETFs and the big money.

Ethereum is another beast. It is a platform, not just a coin: applications, stablecoins and decentralized finance run on top of it. More powerful, but also much harder to sum up in one line. On top of that, it has had to live with competition from other faster and cheaper blockchains and with regulatory uncertainty, in particular around the issue of staking and how the SEC treats it.

🧩 Explained Simply: the ETH/BTC ratio

The ETH/BTC ratio measures how much Ethereum is worth relative to Bitcoin, ignoring the dollar. It is the most honest chart for understanding who is winning inside the crypto world.

If the ratio rises, Ethereum is outperforming Bitcoin. If it falls, it is losing ground. Looking only at the dollar price is misleading: in a market where everything goes up, Ethereum can look strong too, but if it rises less than Bitcoin it is actually losing the relative race. The ETH/BTC ratio strips out the noise and tells you the truth.

What it would really take for the flip

For Ethereum to run harder than Bitcoin again, enthusiasm is not enough. It takes concrete catalysts:

Catalyst Why it matters
Real flows into spot ETH ETFs It is not enough for the ETF to exist: it takes capital that actually comes in, as happened for Bitcoin
Regulatory clarity on staking If staking is cleared by the SEC, Ethereum becomes an asset that “yields”, far more attractive
A strong, simple narrative Stablecoins and payments running on Ethereum could give it the one-line story it lacks today

The compressed spring, in short, exists. But a compressed spring stays compressed until something makes it snap. And timing, in the markets, is the hardest thing to get right.

The risks no influencer tells you about

Coming second does not guarantee the overtake. In technology the “almost leader” sometimes catches up, and other times is simply overtaken by someone else. Ethereum has huge advantages, but also fierce competitors and a complexity that is a double-edged sword.

Whoever buys Ethereum “because it absolutely has to catch up with Bitcoin” is making a bet on the when, not just on the if. And betting on the when is the fastest way to get hurt, even when you are right about the direction.

How to frame it in your trading

Three rules to avoid turning a correct thesis into a loss:

1. Watch the ETH/BTC ratio, not just the dollar price. That is where the race inside the crypto world is decided. We also talked about it in our analysis of Bitcoin and the ETF flows.

2. Size the position before you enter. Crypto moves hard in both directions: the wrong size on Ethereum can cost you dearly in a single night.

Open the Forex Lot Size Calculator

3. Track and stay objective. On “when the flip will come” it is easy to fall in love with your own thesis. Log your trades in the TradingBlog Diary and let the numbers talk, not the hopes.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

— John Maynard KeynesPosta su X

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Bitcoin che si dissolve in flussi di luce assorbiti dai vault degli ETF

Bitcoin in 2026: ETF Flows Now Set the Price

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🤓 Nerd Mode

June 2026 will be remembered as the month Bitcoin stopped listening to Twitter and started listening to Wall Street.

BTC closed June 30 around $58,500, down roughly 20% on the month. Not just any pullback: we’re talking about the worst month relative to historical seasonality, according to Fortune. And the interesting part isn’t the number. It’s the culprit.

It wasn’t retail panic-selling. It was a slow, orderly, almost bureaucratic flow: continuous redemptions from the U.S. spot ETFs. About $4.4 billion in outflows across roughly thirteen sessions since mid-May. Every day a little piece of supply coming back to the market, no shouting, no memes, no capitulation.

Welcome to Bitcoin in 2026: where the marginal price is set by whoever runs an ETF, not by whoever posts rocket emojis.

Net outflows from Bitcoin spot ETFs: -$4.4 billion in June 2026
June 2026: the worst month ever for Bitcoin spot ETF flows. Source: CoinDesk / Fortune.

Who holds the pen now

For years the narrative was simple: retail moves the price, whales front-run it, institutions show up late. In 2026 that story aged badly.

Since Bitcoin spot ETFs became the dominant access channel for professional capital, their net flows are the variable that matters. When money comes in, the issuer buys BTC on the market to back the shares. When it leaves, it sells. ETF flow is supply and demand, translated in real time.

And that’s why June’s drivers tell a coherent story: a more hawkish Fed than expected, keeping real yields high and making a non-yielding asset less appealing; and a rotation of capital toward AI-linked equity, where in 2026 the real party seems to be. In that context, managers simply rotated out. The outflow is the snapshot of that decision.

🧩 Explained Well: what a spot ETF is

A Bitcoin spot ETF is an exchange-listed fund that holds “real” BTC and tracks its price, bought and sold like an ordinary share. Every time capital comes in or goes out, the issuer buys or sells Bitcoin on the real market. That’s why its flows don’t follow the price: they make it.

How a Bitcoin spot ETF works: inflow and outflow
The mechanics of a spot ETF: inflows and outflows translate into purchases and sales of real BTC.

Ethereum, the sibling left behind

If you needed proof that institutional demand is now in charge, not generic “crypto” enthusiasm, look at Ethereum.

In June, ETH spot ETFs recorded outflows for several consecutive sessions, right as the Bitcoin ETFs, for a few sessions, briefly swung back to net inflows. Two products on the same shelf, same regulatory wrapper, opposite behaviors. Professional capital is choosing, and it’s choosing BTC.

The price result is brutal: ETH’s drawdown from its cycle high widened toward -60%, according to Investing.com. The demand gap between the two assets isn’t closing, it’s widening.

Drawdown from the 2026 cycle high: Bitcoin -48% vs Ethereum -60%
Same wrapper, different mandates: Ethereum’s drawdown from the cycle peak is deeper than Bitcoin’s. Source: Investing.com.

The nerd read is this: in the ETF world there is no “crypto” as a single block. There are individual assets with individual mandates, and whoever allocates decides line by line. Bitcoin has earned “institutional portfolio asset” status. Ethereum, for now, remains the more technical exposure that struggles to find the same patient buyers.

The SEC is redrawing which ETFs get born

Here comes the piece few are connecting, but which could matter more than any single session of outflows.

Around June 30 the SEC opened a comment window of roughly 60 days, through early September, on a new single, “asset-neutral” framework for complex, next-generation ETFs. Source: The Block.

A regulatory gateway filtering crypto tokens into approved and rejected lanes
The SEC’s new “asset-neutral” framework decides in advance which crypto ETFs can be born and which can’t.

What’s inside that perimeter? Basically the entire next wave: spot crypto ETFs, staking-yield products, altcoin baskets, and even ETFs tied to prediction markets. Not by chance, around two dozen event-contract filings have been frozen since May, waiting for the rules of the game to be written.

Translated: the SEC is stepping away from judging every crypto ETF case by case and is trying to define a single model. A framework that decides in advance which structures are admissible and which aren’t. What kind of products will be able to raise institutional capital in the coming years. And if ETF flows are now Bitcoin’s marginal price, then whoever writes the ETF rules is writing the price rules.

It’s no longer a question of adoption. It’s a question of architecture.

What to watch

Two events, both on the near-term calendar.

  • FOMC minutes, July 8. If they confirm the hawkish tone that drove June’s outflows, the pressure on ETF inflows stays. If they open even a slightly softer crack, the flow can turn fast, and we now know that flow is the price.
  • SEC window, through early September. Every comment, every draft, every signal about what will enter the “asset-neutral” framework is material for understanding the next generation of institutional crypto products. And which assets will be left out.

Crypto in 2026 is no longer read on social media. It’s read in the flows and the filings.

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Disclaimer: content for purely informational and educational purposes. It does not constitute financial advice or an investment solicitation. Always do your own research.