Bitcoin is trading near $109,000 ahead of Friday’s release of the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI), holding what analysts at QCP Capital call a “narrow range equilibrium.” This is one of the few data points unaffected by the ongoing US government shutdown.
QCP said the CPI is a “singular anchor” for policy expectations and a modest 0.2% rise could boost risk assets and improve liquidity sentiment. Until then, the market will remain frozen in place, caught between cautious optimism and profit-taking.
Bitcoin has been trending lower since hitting a record high of over $126,000 on October 6, losing momentum as traders digest various macro signals.
“The bull market is over,” John Glover warned. Yahoo FinanceGlover believes the market has entered a bearish phase that could last until late 2026. Glover expects prices to rebound toward $70,000 to $80,000, but acknowledged that a bounce toward $124,000 remains possible in the short term.
Bitcoin price is not in a full-blown bear market
Some see the move as a healthy reset. VanEck’s ChainCheck report calls this pullback a “liquidity-driven mid-cycle correction” rather than a full-blown bear market. The company pointed to the normalization of leverage, stabilization of on-chain activity, and the growing role of Bitcoin as a hedge against fiat currency depreciation.
Analysts Matthew Siegel and Nathan Frankowitz noted that global liquidity, measured through M2 money supply, still explains more than half of Bitcoin’s price fluctuations, highlighting its macro sensitivity.
Van Eck said Asia’s trading hours are increasingly determining global trends, and October’s drawdown was linked to a liquidity crunch in Asia as central banks defended their currencies.
Futures open interest has fallen from an overheated peak of $52 billion to normalized levels, eliminating excess speculation and setting up a potential re-entry point.
Still, Standard Chartered’s Jeffrey Kendrick remains bullish. Although he expects a drop below $100,000 to be “inevitable” in the short term, he sees this as a buying opportunity, maintaining his year-end target of $200,000 and long-term forecast of $500,000 by 2028.
ETF flows increase uncertainty. The US Spot Bitcoin ETF recorded $101 million in outflows on Wednesday, and the Ethereum ETF lost another $19 million, indicating that institutional investors’ appetite for investment has cooled.
But just yesterday, T. Rowe Price, one of the largest asset management companies in the United States, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch an ETF focused on cryptocurrencies.
The proposed ETF would track the 10 largest U.S.-listed cryptocurrencies by market capitalization that meet the SEC’s listing criteria.
This article Bitcoin Price Stabilizes at $109,000 as Markets Await CPI, Analysts Divided on Direction was originally published in Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Micah Zimmerman.
