Nov 26, 2025
By Proper Asset Management
At the moment, with Bitcoin pulling back toward the 80,000 levels we have not seen since April, and Ethereum briefly breaking through the key technical level at 2,800, the market has shifted into a state of maximum panic. The fear index touched 11, which is extreme fear, and retail is selling tokens. The narrative across social media — and a quick check-in with a few retail investors we know — suggests many exited Bitcoin around 82 to 85 and are now bracing for a protracted bear phase.
Let’s first walk through what drove this and then outline a practical playbook.
The most meaningful driver has been the market’s reassessment of the probability of a rate cut at the December FOMC meeting, falling from roughly 90 percent to about 30 percent. This repricing followed hawkish remarks from Powell, who framed the prior cut as a response to uncertainty and noted that a second cut before year-end 2025 is not guaranteed. From that point, we saw a two-leg correction in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. When the S&P 500 is down several hundred points in a day, crypto typically follows.
That linkage is standard.
The lack of fresh labor-market data due to the recent shutdown also reinforced risk-off sentiment. The BLS stated that even the October employment data — not just November — would only be released after the December FOMC meeting. In other words, the committee will be making its decision without a full read on the latest jobs numbers.
On Friday, Boston Fed President Susan Collins said a December cut would not be inflationary, which sparked a solid rebound in the S&P 500 and pushed implied cut odds back up to about 62 percent.
There are other plausible contributors as well, including heavy institutional outflows from ETFs, potential selling pressure from market makers that took sizable losses on October 10, and stress across DAT firms. The largest Ethereum DAT has already sold part of its stake last week, etc. Still, let’s move on.
Even if the Fed does not cut in December and we get another sharp leg lower, the broader setup for a sustained bear market is not in place.
This correction is healthy, and stepping back, Bitcoin would need to rally about 50 percent from here to reclaim its all-time high. That sounds aggressive, but it is difficult to find a compelling fundamental case for why it would not happen.
Zooming out to the big picture we discussed over the summer: the early-autumn highs are unlikely to be meaningfully broken before year-end, and if they are, it would likely be marginal. The most probable path from here is stabilization and a move toward 95k, then 103k, with that grind potentially lasting into the December meeting. That said, any credible positive catalyst could trigger a fast V-shape rebound.
The core action plan here is short-term trading with a bias toward longs, since the macro narrative remains intact and still skews globally constructive.