Spot Bitcoin ETF flows were the part of All Things Crypto's October 4 weekly analysis that stayed with me. The creator reads them as neutral to mildly bullish: about $6.34 billion came in during the third quarter after roughly $5 billion left in the second, but the buying that returned in October landed almost entirely in IBIT while the other funds were net sellers. Bitcoin closed that week at $85,269.78, between support at $82,500 and resistance overhead.
What a spot Bitcoin ETF actually holds
An exchange-traded fund pools money from many investors and issues shares that trade on a stock exchange, so you can buy or sell them through an ordinary brokerage account. A spot bitcoin ETF holds bitcoin itself. A custodian keeps the coins, and the fund's shares are meant to track the value of those coins, minus the fund's fee.
A share gives you exposure to bitcoin's price without a private key or a wallet you control, and you cannot send coins to anyone. You get a ticker and a brokerage statement instead. I think that trade is the point of the product: it lets money that would never touch a self-custody wallet hold bitcoin through a familiar account.
The link between the fund and the coin is creation and redemption. Large firms, usually called authorised participants, can give the fund cash or bitcoin and receive newly created shares, or hand shares back and take the underlying assets out. When they create shares, the fund needs more bitcoin; when they redeem, it sells. That arbitrage keeps the share price close to net asset value, the value of the bitcoin the fund holds.
A flow figure is the net of those creations and redemptions over a day, measured in dollars. An inflow means the funds in aggregate added bitcoin. An outflow means they reduced it. That is the number the creator was reading when he called ETF flows neutral to mildly bullish.
Why the flows move the price
Demand that used to sit outside the market can now arrive in a brokerage account. An adviser who cannot custody coins for clients, or someone who wants bitcoin exposure inside a retirement account, can buy a fund instead. The fund then has to buy bitcoin to back the new shares.
The distinction between spot and futures funds matters here. A futures ETF holds contracts that settle against bitcoin's price and rolls them as they expire, so it never needs to buy a coin. A spot fund does. Spot flow data therefore tracks money that had to be matched with actual bitcoin in a custodian's vault.
Daily flow reports get attention because most bitcoin buying happens in private wallets, at over-the-counter desks or on offshore venues, where nobody publishes a number. The funds publish theirs every trading day. They are the market's most visible gauge of new money, even if they cover only one route into bitcoin.
Those reports describe the past, and they follow price as often as they lead it, because allocators tend to buy after a rally and stop after a drawdown. I read the weekly and monthly totals and treat single sessions as noise. A $102 million day means little on its own; three weeks in the same direction tell you something about the buyer base.
The quarter that turned the flows around
The second quarter of 2026 saw roughly $5 billion leave the funds. The third quarter brought about $6.34 billion in, and $2.6 billion of that arrived in September. The figures:
| Period | Net flow |
|---|---|
| Q2 2026 | about $5 billion out |
| Q3 2026 | about $6.34 billion in |
| September 2026 | about $2.6 billion in |
| Early October 2026, one day | $102 million out |
The quarter flipped from net selling to net buying, which is the shift the creator called mildly bullish. The timing was uneven: $2.6 billion of the $6.34 billion is roughly 41%, so most of the recovery landed in a single month. A quarter that ends strong on a back-loaded inflow is a different signal from one that grinds higher every month. I would want the next month to hold up before treating the turn as a trend.
A single fund carried the buying
Breadth is the detail that matters most. October opened with an outflow day of $102 million, and when the buying came back the creator said it was almost all in IBIT, with the other funds net sellers. He called demand "pretty uneven" and wanted to keep an eye on it.
Concentration tells you about the buyer base. A broad inflow across many funds suggests a lot of different allocators made the same decision at the same time, which is harder to reverse than a single client. One fund doing the buying can mean a single platform or a single large institution is responsible, and if that source pauses, the flow number flips without anything changing in bitcoin's own fundamentals.
That reading assumes the concentration reflects a narrow set of clients. The fund could also be the easiest one for a broker to offer. Both explanations are plausible, and the flow data alone cannot separate them. I would watch whether the other funds stop selling. That would be the first sign the demand has widened beyond a single ticker.
How to read spot Bitcoin ETF flows
The practical steps, in order:
- Start with the total across all funds. A headline from one issuer describes one fund, not the market.
- Check the spread. If the inflow sits in one fund while the rest sell, the demand is narrow.
- Compare the share price with net asset value. A wide premium or discount tells you the wrapper is under stress.
- Look at the fee before comparing funds, because it comes out of the fund's assets year after year.
- Read the numbers in weeks, not days. The creator framed a quarter, not a session.
Individual fund fees and the full daily table behind these figures are not broken out, so check the issuer's fee and the fund's premium or discount before relying on a quoted flow number.
Fund shares trade only while the stock market is open, while bitcoin trades around the clock. A weekend move in bitcoin shows up in the share price at the next open, which is why Monday flow data sometimes looks out of step with the weekend's price action. It also means a fund is a poor tool for anyone who wants to react to a Sunday night candle.
The levels the creator is watching
The chart below shows the four prices the analysis puts around the market.
On the daily chart, $87,400 was overhead resistance and $82,500 the support underneath. The creator said both were tested within about five dollars, a move he put down to liquidity sweeps by algorithms hunting stops inside the range. What would confirm bullish momentum for him is a break above $87,400, then a retest, then a hold. A daily close below $82,500 would slow the bullish momentum without ending the larger uptrend he sees from the August impulse.
The weekly candle gives the resistance claim some weight. Bitcoin opened at $84,472.01, reached a high of $87,220.00, dipped to $82,563.00 and closed at $85,269.78, up 0.94%. The high stopped $180 short of the resistance, close enough that I would not count the level as broken until a candle closes above it.
The number the creator called the main one is the 50-week moving average at $78,107.06. A moving average is the mean closing price over a set number of weeks, and price above a long average is a common way to describe an uptrend. He treats the weekly close above it as the bull case staying intact and pointed to earlier tests and holds in September 2024 and April 2025 as evidence it has worked as a signal before. The weekly close sits comfortably above it.
The daily relative strength index read 65.32. RSI compares recent gains with recent losses on a 0 to 100 scale, and readings above 70 are often treated as overbought. At 65.32 there is room before that mark, which is the point the creator made, though he also noted a slight loss of momentum compared with the August move. I read that as a market that has paused, not one that has turned.
Funding, open interest and quiet liquidations
Perpetual futures have no expiry date, so exchanges use a periodic payment between long and short traders to keep the contract near the spot price. When funding is positive, longs pay shorts. High positive funding means holding a long is expensive and the position is crowded.
The creator described the funding rate as neutral. It had jumped from 3% to 10% annualised during the previous rally, and that morning it read about 0.0013, which he called pretty flat. His summary was that leverage is not stretched.
Open interest, the total value of derivative contracts still open, had rebuilt during the previous week after touching a 12-month low. He said it does not look too stretched. Rising open interest on a rising price usually means new positions are coming in; rising open interest on a flat price can mean both sides are loading up and the market is coiling.
Liquidations were quiet: about $22 million over the 24 hours to October 2, with no flush in either direction. Forced selling is what turns a normal pullback into a cascade, so a quiet liquidation tape fits the consolidation the creator described.
His ideal setup for a bullish week is specific. He wants a move above the resistance on rising open interest with funding staying calm. Price through resistance plus new positions, without a funding spike, would point to fresh demand instead of a leverage chase. Open interest on its own would not tell you which side is adding, so the price condition matters as much as the funding reading.
Bitcoin dominance and the rotation question
Bitcoin dominance measures bitcoin's share of the total value of the crypto market. It falls when altcoins rise faster than bitcoin, or when bitcoin falls faster than everything else. The daily reading opened at 59.34%, reached 59.76%, dipped to 58.92% and closed at 59.41%, up 0.12%, which the written summary rounds to the 59.5% area.
The creator treats dominance as a range. He sees the 60% area as bullish for bitcoin, and a slide through 59, then 58, then 57 as a possible shift of money into altcoins. The written summary marks a drop below 58% as the first sign of rotation. He added a caveat of his own: a spike in altcoin prices can push the ratio lower by itself, so a falling dominance number does not prove that money left bitcoin. He kept AAVE on the dashboard at $181.39, down 0.11%, as the altcoin side of that comparison.
I treat dominance as context rather than a trigger. If it reached 58%, the useful next step would be checking which assets gained and whether bitcoin's own price held, because a rotation into altcoins and a broad sell-off look identical on this chart.
What I would check before the next weekly close
- The weekly close relative to the resistance, not the intraweek high. The last weekly candle reached $87,220.00 and still closed below it.
- Whether any break of the resistance is followed by the retest and hold the creator asked for, on rising open interest and without a funding spike.
- Whether $82,500 survives on a daily close, the level he said would slow the bullish momentum.
- The 50-week moving average at $78,107.06, the line that keeps the bull case intact in this framework.
- Whether ETF inflow days are spread across funds or still sitting in IBIT alone.
- Dominance in the 58% to 59% zone, and which coins are gaining if it drops.
The creator signed off with "manage the risk, trade the probabilities", and that is the right frame for a week that sits between two well-tested levels. Write the numbers down before the week starts, check the close rather than the wick, and treat any ETF figure as one input among several. The next weekly close will show whether the resistance breaks and whether inflow days spread beyond IBIT.
