25th November 2025 > > Bear trap or bull trap? IREN is the gift that keeps on giving.

tl;dr

Bear trap or bull trap, that is the question. IREN gets ever more interesting as an investment trade idea.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

With perpetual futures funding rates turning negative, despite the brutal liquidation of shorts yesterday, the risk of another squeeze and a larger leg-up remains very much on the table. Which would be nice.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Bear trap or bull trap?

With the spot BTC ETF flows turning positive again, at least for now, allied with a minor recovery in price over the last few days, the question that is being posed is whether this is a bear trap or a bull trap.

The techies are out in force of course, selling their own personal branded snake oil. Let me summarise for you anything and everything a techie has ever said or will ever say.

If we go down in price from here, and we have confirmation at some future point in time that the price is lower, then the price has gone down. That might continue or it might reverse after that point in time, no-one knows.

Conversely, if we go up in price from here, and we have confirmation at some future point in time that the price is higher, then the price has gone up. That might continue or it might reverse after that point in time, no-one knows.

Not very useful, huh?

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Just a few weeks ago there was lots of talk about Elliot Waves. I won’t bore you with the pseudo-science behind this fundamentally flawed concept, but for some reason those who were pushing it have gone very quiet. I give you one guess as to why.

Well done, you all got it one – the answer is that Elliot Waves is a load of old bollocks.

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But having posed the question as to whether we are in a bull or bear trap, I am duty bound to answer, an answer which is a simple one, but without certainty.

If you believe the four-year cycle is intact, then $126k was undoubtedly the local top. If that is true, we will likely see a sharp downward drop in a matter of weeks to $40k or $50k, with sideways chop to the end of next year, before the price of BTC begins its inevitable climb to ever greater all-time highs.

If you believe the four-year cycle is old hat (making you one of the smart ones) then the recent price action has all the symptoms of a classic bear trap.

Take a view, and invest on that basis, and that basis only. But this I do know – if you are a supporter of the four-year cycle, and you are correct in your view, you will undoubtedly miss the opportunity to buy at $40k or $50k being scared it might go lower, and you will be forever chasing it higher. This I also know – if I am wrong in my view that the four-year cycle is dead, I will be buying all the way down, and all the way back up again. I won’t get the absolute low, but I will have clusters of buys close to it, and I am very content with that.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – IREN

Iris Energy Inc. has been a part of the CC Treasury portfolio since September 2023, with an ongoing buying programme. Having returned a near 10x on the total investment in a little over two years, and over 20x on the original investment, I thought perhaps it might be time to reassess.

The initial trade idea was based upon IREN being a clean-energy miner. Don’t worry, I am not going all pink-haired on you. I am not about to start chucking tins of tomato soup over priceless paintings. I will certainly refrain from poisoning the fish and other animals who live in Venetian canals. It just seemed to me that the subsidies available to clean-energy users means that over the long-term they are likely to be more profitable than traditional miners. In comparison, the stock price of MARA has rallied less than 30% over the same period, suggesting that my crude analysis was rather quite effective.

What I failed to spot is that that the same is true for providers of GPU capacity and cloud services for the A.I. industry. IREN recently inked a $9.7bn, five-year deal with Microsoft to deliver 200 megawatts of computing power, a key driver of the 5x increase in the stock price of IREN this year alone. This came on top of a $5.8bn deal with DELL.

As an old school bond trader, equity analysis is something of the dark arts to me, especially given the total lack of dividend flows for the foreseeable future. So, I was interested to read a research piece by Cantor Fitzgerald. The analyst, Brett Knoblach, has pointed to the improvement in 2026 guidance for recurring revenue from $500mm to a whopping $3.4bn. You don’t need to be an equity analysis to get excited by those sorts of figures.

Long story short, Brett has put a target price of $384 by 2028 compared to last night’s close of $49.

I think it is time to add more fuel to the CC Treasury’s ongoing buy programme for IREN.