Morning market report

Morning Market Report, October 24, 2026

The broad crypto market is drifting lower across the board this Saturday morning, with all major coins in the red and the overall trend pointing firmly downward.

BTC is trading at $81,032, down 1.1% over the past 24 hours. A large majority of leveraged traders (68%) are positioned for a rise, and those betting against the price are paying a fee to hold that position at an annualised rate of 7.5%, which reflects modest but real pressure against bears. Leverage overall is not piling up aggressively right now. Notably, in the past hour alone, short-side leveraged positions worth around $135,700 were forcibly closed, meaning traders who bet on a drop got squeezed out as price held its level.

ETH sits at $2,387, down 1.1%, with 75.8% of the crowd positioned long. New leveraged bets on a price rise are actively being added, and the fee paid by those bullish leveraged traders runs at 4.6% annualised. Over the last hour, roughly $22,700 worth of short positions were liquidated, a similar pattern to BTC. XRP fell harder, down 2.1% to $1.2946, with 76% of the crowd long and no short liquidations at all in the past hour, which is a detail worth noting. SOL dropped 1.5% to $103.01, and like ETH, new leveraged long bets are building; around $20,100 in short positions were closed by force in the past hour.

Flows and sentiment paint a mixed picture. Bitcoin ETFs recorded an outflow of approximately $27.6 million yesterday, the second consecutive day of net withdrawals, though the seven-day total still shows $334 million in net inflows, so the longer window remains positive. The Fear and Greed Index sits at 51, squarely neutral. Over the full past 24 hours, leveraged long positions worth $312.7 million were liquidated across the market, compared to $145.7 million on the short side, meaning bulls absorbed significantly more forced selling pressure than bears. BTC longs alone accounted for $81 million, and ETH longs for $50.2 million of that. Total crypto market cap stands at $2.73 trillion, down 1.1%, with Bitcoin's share of the total at 59.5%, a relatively elevated dominance reading suggesting capital is more concentrated in BTC than in altcoins right now. The VIX, a measure of expected volatility in traditional equity markets, is at 19.45, which is a moderate level with no extreme stress signal from that direction.

What to watch today: the trend data describes the current regime as a strong downtrend with very narrow market breadth, meaning few coins are participating in any upside. The crowd is heavily positioned for a rise across all four coins (68 to 76% long), which historically creates a situation where a continued move down could trigger further forced closures of those long positions, amplifying any dip. We are also measuring an overheat indicator for BTC (0.59 out of 1) and ETH (0.56), but this is a measurement tool only and does not carry a verified predictive edge on its own, so treat it as one data point among many. The continuation of ETF outflows over the next session is worth monitoring, given that a streak extending beyond two days would be a change from the broadly positive seven-day picture.