While still the leading altcoin, Ethereum (ETH) went through a brutal Q3 2019 as it broke through to lows not seen in years on its BTC trading pair. And since the summer, it has been on a quest to find the bottom of that capitulation. A promising push has been underway since September to reverse this relentless downtrend on ETH — but the altcoin is continuing to get bogged down at the critical resistance level that marked the descent into capitulation.
We start on the weekly ETH/BTC chart which has just closed, and see a slowing upward momentum as price reaches the critical area of resistance around ₿0.0223. The open question here is whether or not this trend represents the beginning of an uptrend, or the end of a correction within an even larger downtrend.
A sharp rejection and heavy selling came as ETH pierced this resistance for the first time, and we see plenty of volume with a deep sell wick. Selling started at the 21 exponential moving average (EMA). The histogram here is slowly starting to arch down, suggesting a decreasing strength; but it is close enough to a flat trajectory that it could still flatten out and continue up.
Moving to the ETH/BTC daily, however, we see that things here look better. The price action has held above the local inflection point at about ₿0.0215, and the RSI is well above 50. The histogram is arching up sharply so far in the trading day, and we could shortly see another attempt up soon. The problem here is volume, and we’ll need to see more of it soon for a retest — successful or otherwise — of the resistance area.
If we go to the USD pairing, we see that the RSI is showing a bull divergence from price during the past couple months, and doing so in spite of the eye-watering late September 30% price drop, which is attributed to the dual BTC/USD and ETH/BTC drop.
This bull div produced an attempt to get above the key $188 price mark, and a subsequent rejection there. But price is refusing to get kicked down for another leg in the downtrend, not unlike Bitcoin itself.
Overall, we have the open question of ETH’s bottoming-out. It has been a long time in the works, and we very well could have put a bottom in; but ETH is struggling to confirm a new uptrend on both BTC and USD pairings. The good news is that there is only one more leg down, if any, according to a typical (Elliott) reading of trend waves.
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