Bitcoin enters the final day of the quarter in a tight coil of technicals and macro catalysts, with traders fixated on a handful of levels that will likely set the tone for October. Ostium Research’s week-ahead outlook frames the setup as a fading “window of weakness” into a potential Q4 tailwind, but only if the market navigates an event-heavy calendar without losing critical supports. As author Nik Patel puts it, “weekly momentum is still supportive of higher prices and I believe we are now emerging from the window of weakness I had marked out from Friday 20th Sept.”
His base case is unambiguous: “I think any dip you get this week is one you want to look at as an opportunity for longs for the remainder of Q4,” he writes, adding that concerns about a cycle top in October are misplaced given “tailwinds into mid-Dec.” The mid-cycle risk marker sits around $99,000, with a longer-term invalidation tied to the 360-day moving average near $97,900. “Unless we lose $99k on a weekly close, nothing here looks mid-term bearish to me,” Patel states.
On the daily chart, the market carved a higher low above roughly $107,000 after the $112,000 rejection, keeping the short-term structure constructive. Patel’s upside trigger is precise: “If we do now push higher off this low through the rest of this week to close back above the August open and trendline resistance up near $115.7k, I think it is very unlikely you see $107k–$108k retested in October.” Conversely, he stresses the downside waypoint in a volatility burst: “I think the lowest we see this week is the 200dMA at $104.6k on a major flush of the lows.”
The tactical map he sketches gives bulls and bears something to do, sometimes within the same session. On the long side, he favors fading a stop-hunt under last week’s low or into the September open, “with invalidation on a close below the 360-day moving average, currently at $97.9k, below which we have not closed since March 2023.”
If the market squeezes first, he outlines a switch-hitter approach: a sharper rally into the quarterly close that “takes out the $114k high into Oct 1st,” followed by a fade on bearish divergence aiming “for at least $110k, if not $108.5k into the weekend,” where he’s prepared to flip long again.
Positioning and derivatives context backstop the directional view. Patel highlights snapshots across Velo and CoinGlass, three-month annualized basis, and Bitcoin versus altcoin open interest, then overlays expected one-week and one-month liquidation clusters to illustrate where forced flow could accelerate either path. The through-line remains that this week’s volatility is likely the prelude, not the postscript, to Q4. “The opportunity for those lows to be cleaned up should be over the next 5–7 days,” he notes. “If we run last week’s low and then reclaim on the lower timeframes, that could be the October low forming early.”
At press time, BTC traded at $113,248.
