The post Here’s why BTC is stuck in a rut appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

The bitcoin BTC$67,296.56 market has been stuck in a rut for over a month, and investors chasing yields may be partly to blame. Since mid-February, BTC has traded in a range centred on $70,000. Some observers say counteracting forces have been at play. The Iran war-led haven demand has been supporting BTC around $65,000, while rising U.S. Treasury yields have been holding back big gains beyond $75,000. But another factor appears to have been quietly keeping bitcoin trapped in its range, and it’s tied to investors using call options to generate additional yield on top of their spot market holdings. “Throughout Q1, institutional participants have been systematically overwriting calls at higher strikes to harvest premium in a down/sideways market. That activity transferred significant gamma exposure to dealers, who have been hedging by buying into dips and selling into rallies to maintain delta neutrality,” James Harris, CEO at Tesseract, the MiCA-licensed, multi-strategy digital asset manager. Options are derivative contracts that give you the right to buy or sell the underlying asset, in this case, BTC, at a preset price at a later date. A call option gives the right to buy and represents a bullish market bet. A put option offers protection against price slides in BTC. Think of it like reserving a concert ticket today for a small fee. You can buy it later at the reserved price, even if the ticket goes up, or sell your reservation to someone else for a profit. The ticket seller, meanwhile, keeps the small fee. That’s essentially what traders have been doing—they’ve become the ticket sellers. By selling call options, they collect premiums (the fee) while covering the call buyer on potential BTC price rallies. And they do this against their existing bitcoin holdings. That’s called the covered call strategy, a way of…

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Filed under: News - @ March 30, 2026 6:29 am