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Posted May 18, 2026 at 5:28 am
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Coinbase opened lower last Friday after a disastrous earnings miss.
A $1.49 loss per share against an expected 27-cent profit. Revenue $110 million light.
Trading volumes were down 28% quarter over quarter. And the company announced layoffs of 14% of its workforce on the same call.
Most stocks that print a number like that don’t bounce, they just bleed.
COIN reversed off the lows that morning and closed strong.
That’s the moment I started paying closer attention.
When bad news doesn’t break a chart, the chart is telling you the structural buyers are still there.
My read on any market starts with the same question. Who’s holding the gains, and who’s sitting at the lows?
For weeks now, the rest of the crypto complex has been telling a story Coinbase wasn’t part of yet.
Bitcoin reclaimed $81,000 and stayed there. Solana broke out of a months-long descending triangle. MicroStrategy and MARA have been printing higher highs.
COIN was the only major name in the complex that hadn’t joined the move.
That’s the laggard story. When the laggard finally joins, it usually means the rest of the move has further to run.
That changed this week.
Now look at where Coinbase reversed from.
That’s not a new floor. It’s been the floor for nearly two years.
The buyers have shown up at this level three separate times since 2024. Summer of that year was the first. They came back in spring 2025.
And this past February, when the stock fell to $139, they were there again. Same selling pressure, same outcome.
The earnings miss last week could have been the next test of that floor. It wasn’t. The stock bottomed well above $140 and reversed off the lows.
From the February low, COIN has carved out a textbook rounded bottom. The right side of that pattern caps at $215, the level the stock is breaking above as I write this.
And it isn’t breaking out in isolation.
The Clarity Act, the first major piece of US crypto market structure legislation, cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15 to 9 yesterday on a bipartisan vote.
Bitcoin reclaimed $81,000. Strategy, MARA, and coin were all up 4-6%.
The relationships move before the news catches up. The chart reads them first.
Coinbase remains one of the cleanest equity vehicles to express a bullish view on crypto. It gives you leveraged exposure to the entire complex without holding the underlying assets.
For the trade, the structure tells me what I need to know.
$215 is the breakout level. As long as it holds as the new floor, the next leg has room to run toward the $250 to $260 zone where the Street’s price targets cluster.
Below that, I’m watching two levels. A close back under $215 invalidates the breakout. A break of $140 would crack the entire two-year base.
I bought calls on Coinbase yesterday for Beat Report.
Earnings tell you about last quarter. The chart tells you what comes next.
P.S. If you want the strikes, the expirations, and the levels where we exit, the Beat Report has them. Tap here to learn more.
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Originally posted 15th May 2026
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