In the latest episode of Coin Stories with host Nathalie Brunell, investor and podcaster Preston Pysh provided a structurally grounded answer to the question that many Bitcoin holders have been wondering all summer: if corporate investment funds are continuously announcing large purchases, why does the price keep declining and volatile?
Pysh's diagnosis is not about long-term investors suddenly losing faith, but about the structural market dynamics created by sophisticated "fast money" companies designed to curb volatility while extracting basis and funding premiums.
Why Isn't Bitcoin Price Rising More?
Brunell pointedly questioned why spot Bitcoin is trading sideways despite momentum from "the Trump administration" and "all the corporate treasury companies buying in," and who "is really on the sell side" creating resistance to the targets of "$150,000 and $200,000" that people are still waiting for by the end of the year.
Pysh starts with empathy for that discord: "I can totally feel the frustration and pain because it’s like every day there’s an announcement like, oh, this company just bought over ten thousand Bitcoin. The price dropped that day or something."
From there, he points out the rise of volatility harvesting strategies, delta-neutral strategies operated by major trading firms on Wall Street. “If I had to guess what it is, I think there are Wall Street traders making quick money—like Jane Street, and many others—who are… trading by extracting volatility from the market and really have no risk, other than they are buying and selling simultaneously and they are profiting from the spread.”
In fact, these trades combine spot contracts, futures contracts, and perpetual swaps, so the exchange will flatten one way while cutting the spread. Pysh argues that the second-order effect is visible on the chart: "This will cause volatility to continue to gradually decrease as it rises... volatility will increasingly decrease in the process."
He continues, that constraint alters the feel of a bullish trend. Instead of the typical explosive rallies that often disrupt the Bitcoin bull market, price action is compressed into narrower bands, separated by mean reversals.
“I think this will lead you to the scenario where the spring is winding up and it will bounce out one way or another,” he says. Directionally, the multi-cycle trend is still upward, but he opposes the lazy reasoning that a textbook volatility squeeze must resolve vertically. “The market depends a lot on liquidity… They depend on all the other external factors… I’m not… saying that volatility is collapsing, it’s rising and we will… go to the moon. I’m not saying that.”
Within Pysh's framework, liquidity is the gating variable that determines whether the spring actually bounces back or not. He looks at global risk representations as a tool to understand fiat liquidity rather than limiting the analysis to cryptocurrency flows.
“When I look at the liquidity metrics of global equities, it's a great way that I like to… consider… I will look at all global equity markets, and if they are all rising strongly, that tells me that the market is flooded with liquidity—fiat liquidity. And right now, that’s what we are seeing… it’s all like an auction. So for me, that’s a healthy indicator that Bitcoin could rise higher. But that also depends on whether that, regardless of its origin, will continue to sustain.”
However, Pysh warns against treating volatility compression as a certain countdown measure for six-figure price targets. "People just need to be careful... there’s no guarantee that the market will continue to rise strongly or that the compression is signaling we’ll hit $200,000 in the coming weeks."
He also acknowledges that if someone still believes in the four-year halving pace, then this phase looks different from previous cycles. "Maybe we’ve seen a bit of what we’ve seen, which is a weakening compared to what we’ve seen historically in price volatility... At this stage of the cycle... you will see a very strong move has occurred and... honestly, going back... to the Christmas timeframe, I had already guessed it," he admits, his voice lowering as if acknowledging that the expected vertical expansion simply has not occurred on schedule.
