Wall Street's Options Desks Are Now Betting on Bitcoin Hitting $100,000 by December

While the ETF inflow numbers were still being digested, a second data set pointed the same direction: the options market. A CNBC segment aired this week showed Bitcoin ETF options volume running at four times its 30 day average, with more than twice as many calls bought as puts, a lean that Simply Bitcoin's hosts read as Wall Street putting real money behind a December rally.

WHAT THE OPTIONS DESKS ARE DOING

Reporting live from Cboe Global Markets in Chicago, CNBC's Oliver Renick said volume in BlackRock's IBIT options was running four times its 30 day average, and volume in Strategy's MSTR options was two and a half times normal. The most aggressive bets were on Strategy, where traders bought calls at strikes between $170 and $200 expiring within days, a wager on a roughly 30 percent move. In IBIT, the most popular contract by volume was a call expiring December 18 that needs Bitcoin to trade back near its all time high of just under $130,000. Market makers were pricing the odds of that at about 12 percent.

THE PREDICTION MARKETS AGREE, LOOSELY

Kalshi's odds, cited on the show, put the year end Bitcoin price forecast at $87,000 on roughly $37 million in volume, which the hosts called a bearish base case given how much money is riding on it. But broken out by range, more money sat on outcomes above $90,000 than below $65,000. Roughly 9.7 percent of bettors backed a finish between $90,000 and $95,000, another 8.3 percent backed $95,000 to $100,000, and 5.6 percent backed $100,000 to $105,000, a distribution the hosts said skews more bullish than the single headline number suggests.

JAMES LAVISH'S TIMELINE

The clearest verbal forecast came from James Lavish, managing partner of the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and a board director at Strive. Comparing the current cycle's drawdown to 2019 through 2021 rather than the more chaotic 2021 to 2025 cycle, Lavish wrote that without a major market disruption, Bitcoin should be testing its all time high again within 60 to 120 days. On the show, that timeline was treated as validation of a call the hosts had already been making, though they noted it would mean new highs arriving within roughly 100 days of the year's end, a pace they called far faster than most people are currently pricing in.

WHY THE HOSTS THINK THIS CYCLE IS DIFFERENT

The show's argument is that this bear market bottomed around a 55 percent drawdown from the peak, well short of the 70 to 80 percent drawdowns of the 2018 and 2022 cycles. Their explanation: without a euphoric blow off top, there was no equivalent euphoric crash to match it. If that holds, and options desks, prediction markets and a Strive board member are all leaning toward a December run at six figures, the specific number to watch is whether Bitcoin clears the $85,000 to $95,000 resistance band in the next few weeks. That is the level the hosts said would decide whether the December bets pay out or expire worthless.

This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.