Peter Brandt Agrees: This COT Shift Could Be Bitcoin’s Biggest Bull Signal Since 2025

Peter Brandt backs a rare COT positioning flip in Bitcoin futures. McClellan says large specs turned net long with urgency. Is a rally coming?

Three strikes. That was Peter Brandt’s opening move on X early this week, a pointed chart throwing shade at Bitcoin’s repeated failures to break a descending resistance line. Then something interesting happened.

He walked it back. Not the chart, exactly. But the conclusion.

In a post on X, Brandt responded to an analysis by Tom McClellan with a short but sharp agreement: “COT argues for an immediate rally.” That was it. No caveats. The man who just drew three rejection strikes on a Bitcoin chart pivoted to bullish in one sentence.

What McClellan’s Chart Actually Showed

McClellan, the publisher behind mcoscillator.com, had shared a chart overlaying Bitcoin futures prices with non-commercial trader positioning from CFTC COT data. The data runs from late 2021 through mid-2026. Price on a log scale, black line. Non-commercial net position, red line.

In late 2025, the red line was deep in negative territory. Non-commercial traders were net short, a bearish lean that lined up with Bitcoin’s price decline during that period.

Source: McClellanOsc 

Now the same line has turned sharply higher. According to McClellan on X, those traders have moved from net short to net long “in a big way” and with “some urgency.” That kind of speed matters in positioning analysis, not just the direction.

The reason this gets attention in Bitcoin markets is structural. In traditional commodity futures, the “commercials” are producers and hedgers, and they carry the smart money label. Bitcoin has almost none of those. Miners don’t hedge at scale the way oil producers do. So the non-commercial traders, large specs and hedge funds, end up filling that role instead.

The Disconnect Brandt Couldn’t Ignore

The timing here is what makes it odd. Brandt had posted his own Bitcoin chart just hours earlier, framing BTC’s repeated resistance failures with a baseball analogy. How many strikes before you’re out? The chart showed two separate descending channels, each with three labeled rejections at the upper trendline. Bearish pattern. Clean setup.

McClellan quoted that exact chart and countered it with the COT data. The positioning, he argued, is different now compared to the prior period Brandt’s bearish structure references. That distinction, between price structure and trader positioning, is where the debate lives.

Brandt agreed. Publicly. On the same thread.

There’s a version of markets where both reads are right at the same time. Bearish chart structure, bullish positioning data, and the two are pulling in opposite directions. What resolves them is price. For now, Bitcoin is sitting inside a descending channel while the largest speculative cohort in the futures market holds an unusually strong long position.

For context on what’s happening at the derivatives layer more broadly, a recent analysis on Bitcoin futures noted that Bitcoin’s April rally was driven almost entirely by perpetual futures demand, with spot accumulation lagging behind. That structural gap is still sitting unresolved.

Three Strikes, But the Scoreboard Changed

COT reports are weekly snapshots. Tuesdays. They don’t predict the next candle or even the next week. What they show is where informed money was positioned heading into a stretch of price action.

The red line in McClellan’s chart turned before price confirmed anything. That’s the point he was making. Brandt’s chart shows the price structure. McClellan’s chart shows who’s betting on what underneath it.

When Brandt endorsed the COT read, he wasn’t abandoning the technical setup. He was acknowledging a second input. The chart still has three strikes on it. The scoreboard just got complicated.

Brandt has shifted his Bitcoin view before. After drawing a bearish banana peel bottom scenario in late 2025, he was also publicly long on the long-term case for a $200,000 BTC cycle. He holds both views simultaneously. That’s the part most traders miss.

Whether the COT signal holds or gets washed out depends on what price does near current resistance. The non-commercials are long. Brandt noticed.

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