Wrecker Capital CIO Quinn Thompson said the market has just experienced a rare “positioning rinse” that has left the crypto consensus pointing in the wrong direction at exactly the wrong time. On October 20, Thompson wrote, “Only once, maybe twice a year, do I feel like I have a view that is 180 degrees different from the crypto Twitter consensus,'' and cited previous episodes in September 2023, September 2024, and February 2025 as similar inflection points in sentiment. “I use the following three tweets to summarize the consensus,” he added, linking to contemporaneous bearish posts from @qwqiao, @blknoiz06, and @cburniske to frame the general mood.
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Mr. Thompson's central argument is straightforward and deliberately contrarian. The October 10th open interest flush was not a reason to turn bearish on Bitcoin and Ethereum in the medium term, but rather a capitulation that typically precedes strong forward returns. “The current setup for BTC and ETH is unusual. While standing on the Goldilocks doorstep of macro, it is the largest positioning washout in crypto history. The 10/10 liquidation cleared more USD and % of OI leverage than the entire January-April 2025 period. The opportunities ahead are similar to the 24 years prior to the Trump victory,” he said.
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This message is not a victory lap, he stressed. “It's stupid that I even have to say this, but the tweets mentioned aren't about wrong or right, they're just about feelings… Sometimes it's better to observe more, love more, and say less.”
The positioning argument is based on a simple historical heuristic. That is, after flushing forced sellers, selling “after” a significant deleveraging event is usually a bad trade. “Would anyone like to calculate what percentage of -30-40% open interest crypto liquidation events it would have been better to turn bearish after they occurred?” asked Thompson.
He made his hypothesis clear. “Being bearish over a moderate time frame after a large liquidation event, say 40/80/120 days, is almost always a poor risk/return, especially if it's on the scale of a 10/10 event.” Market veteran Alex Krüger and Framework Ventures co-founder Vance Spencer each answered “0%,” briefly endorsing that probabilistic view.
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Beyond positioning, Thompson ties cryptocurrency settings to a macro context that he repeatedly characterizes as “Goldilocks.” At the end of the summer, he and Felix Jovan discussed the gold bull incident at Forward Guidance. Thompson said the theory was crystallized by a widely circulated image of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi holding hands at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit.
“When this photo leaked, it was the nail in the coffin and the clearest gold buy signal we could get after 4-5 months of consolidation,” he wrote, claiming that Bitcoin is currently in a similar position after about 10 months of consolidation.
“We’re basically getting the same thing now…don’t miss the forest for the trees,” he said, referring to a pro-policy post from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. “I'm excited to head to Washington, DC tomorrow to join forces with key decision makers to bring market structure to the desks of @POTUS.” This is part of a constructive backdrop for the US market's plumbing structure.
@ForwardGuidance reminds me of @fejau_inc and my gold rant at the end of the summer. When this photo was leaked, it was the nail in the coffin and the clearest gold buying signal to come after 4-5 months of consolidation.
The rest is basically the same thing… pic.twitter.com/ry29kkKocz
— Quinn Thompson (@qthomp) October 22, 2025
At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $109,101.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart on TradingView.com
