The recalibration follows an early-October swing that saw bitcoin fail to hold above its recent local high—Kendrick cited the Oct. 10 risk-off break and the absence of a strong reflex rally—shifting the bank’s focus to where the market bottoms rather than whether it immediately resumes trend.
In the latest note, Kendrick pointed to a handful of signposts for a base-building phase, including monitoring capital rotation between gold and bitcoin and the trajectory of US dollar liquidity and quantitative tightening. He also observed that bitcoin has respected its 50-week moving average since early 2023, a level he views as an important longer-duration line in the sand.
Market context is aligned with the cautionary near-term tone. Over the past two weeks, bitcoin has shed roughly ten percent, with spot trading today around $108,000 as liquidity thins into the weekend and macro sensitivity to policy headlines remains elevated.
What matters from here is whether the confirmation signals Kendrick highlighted begin to line up. A decisive improvement in dollar liquidity conditions, sustained evidence of rotation back into bitcoin at the expense of gold, and preservation of higher-timeframe trend structures would validate the “last time below $100,000” claim.
Absent those, a deeper retracement cannot be ruled out, but that scenario would represent a deviation from the bank’s published roadmap rather than its base case. For now, Standard Chartered’s message is unambiguous: brace for a dip under six figures, but treat it—quoting Kendrick directly—as “the last-ever chance to buy BTC for less than six figures,” provided the medium-term catalysts reassert.
At press time, BTC traded at $109,953.
