Bitcoin (BTC) Stalls Below $81,831 50-Day Moving Average Ahead of FOMC

50-Day Average Caps the Bounce

Bitcoin (BTC) price stands at $80,786, between the $80,297 low reached on Bitstamp earlier on Wednesday and the 50-day moving average at $81,831 overhead. The session's bounce reached $81,700 and failed there, around the Wall Street open, and the reading taken soon after put the asset 0.3% lower on the day. The 50-day simple moving average, a trend line watched across timeframes, capped the intraday rally and held as the session's ceiling. The band that frames Wednesday is about $1,530 wide from floor to average, and the day's support and resistance now sit at its edges. Attention runs to the Federal Open Market Committee, which publishes its statement later on Wednesday before a press conference from Fed chair Kevin Warsh. Rate-futures pricing showed 90.6% odds of a pause, with the target range held at 3.75-4%. December is where the disagreement lives: pricing there still makes a 0.25% hike the base case, so Warsh's wording carries weight beyond the hold itself. A hold today changes little; any wording on December shifts odds that remain only half-priced. US equities opened flat into the decision, offering no assist even after South Korea's KOSPI closed up 6.6%, its best daily gain since July. Between the floor and the ceiling, the session has stayed inside a narrow corridor: the low came first, the bounce came second, and the rejection returned price to the neighborhood it started from. Live tracking puts the quote back at $80,786, marginally above the mid-session print, so the day reads as flat rather than as a decline. Position, not direction, describes the market best: roughly $490 above Wednesday's tested low and $1,045 beneath the average that stopped the rally.

Keith Alan, cofounder of the trading platform Material Indicators, treats the December odds as the real prize of the meeting and frames the gap between the two decisions around the US midterm election on Nov. 3. He flagged Warsh's comments as the December swing factor in a post published before the statement. “Markets may have priced in no rate change, but they haven't priced in the election outcome,” he wrote on Tuesday. His technical trigger was narrower: a four-hour close under $80,565, he argued, would reduce the probability of a renewed test of the 50-day line. Order-book data shows the bid shelf below the market shifting down and thickening at once. Only $3.4M in resting bids remains at $80,000, while the $78,000-79,000 zone now stacks about $42M, up from roughly $24M in mid-October. The weekly on-chain report tracking the shift calls that block the largest pool of bids near price, and the first place buyers would step in on a dip. The shelf at $80,000, once the natural landing zone for a dip, has largely drained. Equities ran the other way: the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite did not follow the KOSPI higher. Data analyst Charl van Zyl notes that the Nasdaq, even after a two-day bounce near 10%, sits 34% below its June 22 record of 9,115, and that Monday's close had been 40% below the peak. He expects the Fed outcome and this week's tech earnings to shape how the market judges the health of the AI sector. For Bitcoin (BTC), the equity comparison is not abstract: our recent tally of Bitcoin's record against the S&P 500 puts the win rate at 55.6% of trading days since Oct 1. The macro wait also caps a soft month: our tracking of the October slide reached 4.2% ahead of the Oct 31 close. None of it changes the corridor: $80,300 at the floor, $81,831 at the ceiling, with the statement still to come.

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The December swing factor.

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Our composite scoring reads the same squeeze from both sides. The nearer overhead edge sits at $81,405, a resistance level scored 83 out of 100, while the first floor below, $80,161, carries a score of 84. Positioning stayed constructive through the pullback: the perp funding rate held at 0.0058% and open interest across the market stood at $16.34B. The full set of levels behind these scores is maintained on our technical analysis page for the coin. The gap that settles the next move is small either way: from the current $80,786 quote, the ceiling is about $620 away and the floor about $625, so the statement needs to move price less than 1% to pick a side of the band.