The routine is seven readings, one written sentence each, once a week. It takes under an hour once you know where the tabs are. The part that makes it work is not the indicator list â it is that you decide on Sunday and execute during the week, instead of deciding at the moment you are most likely to be wrong.
There is one thing to sort out before the list, though, and it is specific to anyone whose data lives on US market calendars.
Sunday is the right slot and the wrong data.
Crypto never closed. Almost everything you are about to read did. US spot ETF flows are published against a Friday close and nothing lands over the weekend. CME futures stop Friday afternoon and do not reopen until Sunday evening New York time. Coinbase Premium keeps printing, but with the ETF creation machinery switched off, so the weekend version of it is a different animal from the weekday version.
So a Sunday review is reading two clocks at once. Three of the seven items are live; the flow-related ones are a snapshot that is already two days old and will be revised by Monday lunchtime. That is not a reason to move the review â the quiet is genuinely useful, and you are not going to get a clean read at 10am Tuesday. It is a reason to date-stamp the stale ones. When I write the ETF line I write the date of the flow print next to it, so that on Wednesday I know whether I am acting on something current or something from last week.
The seven lines, and the order I read them in.
Slow things first, fast things last. Structural position sets the tone for how much size is reasonable at all; leverage and mood only tell you about the next few days. Reading sentiment first tends to colour everything after it, which is why Fear and Greed sits at the bottom of this list rather than the top.
| # | Reading | What the sentence has to contain |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | BTC dominance trend | Direction over the week and whether BTC itself was up or down while dominance moved. Both, or the line is useless. |
| 2 | MVRV cycle position | Where it sits relative to the last two cycles, not against a fixed threshold. Changes slowly; most weeks this line is "unchanged". |
| 3 | ETF net flow direction | Net for the week, the sign, and the date of the last published print. |
| 4 | Coinbase Premium sign and size | Sign, rough size, and whether it lines up with the flow line above or contradicts it. |
| 5 | Funding rate percentile | Where current funding sits inside its own recent range, plus the direction of travel across the week. |
| 6 | Open interest week over week | The change, paired with the price change. OI up with price up and OI up with price down are opposite statements. |
| 7 | Fear and Greed | The number and the shape of the last 30 days. Not the label. |
Two of these are pairs, and treating them as pairs is most of the value. Dominance without BTC's own direction cannot distinguish rotation from a general sell-off. Open interest without price cannot distinguish new positioning from unwinding. If you only have time to do this properly for two lines, do it for those.
Where to get them: dominance and premium have dashboards here (BTC.D, Coinbase premium), funding and open interest come off any derivatives aggregator or straight from your venue's public API, MVRV needs an on-chain source or the Z-score calculator, and Fear and Greed is alternative.me's index. The tools comparison covers which free tiers cover which of these.
Write it. Reading it does not count.
This is the rule that separates a checklist from browsing. Every line gets a sentence typed out, and the sentence has to contain a number and a direction. "Funding looks hot" is not a sentence; "funding is near the top of its 90-day range and has been climbing four days" is.
The reason is unglamorous: a written sentence can be wrong next week and a vague impression cannot. After ten weeks you have a log you can grade yourself against, and the grading is the only real feedback loop in this whole exercise. If you re-read a line from three weeks ago and cannot tell whether it turned out right, the line was badly written, not unlucky.
Then one more line at the bottom: the trigger. Not a forecast â a condition and the action attached to it. "If price loses the level I marked and funding is still positive, cut a third." A forecast gives you something to defend. A trigger gives you something to execute.
The weekend hole nobody plans for.
CME's Bitcoin futures close Friday and reopen Sunday evening New York time. Spot trades straight through. When spot moves over the weekend, the futures chart reopens with a visual gap between Friday's settle and Sunday's open, and a whole folklore has grown up about those gaps filling.
What matters for a Sunday review is narrower and more useful than the folklore: if spot has run a long way while the regulated venue was shut, then a chunk of positioning that would normally have adjusted has not adjusted yet. Monday's open is where that catches up, and it is a common source of moves that look like they came from nowhere on a crypto-only chart. Note the gap's existence and size on Sunday, decide in advance whether you want to be holding size into Monday morning, and leave the fill statistics alone. We went through what the gap data does and does not support in CME futures gaps and weekend spot moves.
What if Sunday and Wednesday disagree?
Something will always happen mid-week that feels like it invalidates the whole review. Almost none of it does. The filter I use: reopen the review only if two of the seven lines have genuinely flipped, not one, and not "one flipped and the timeline is loud about it".
One line moving is normal noise â funding swings on a single squeeze, the premium flips on a single session. Two unrelated lines flipping together means the structure changed, and that earns fifteen minutes and a rewrite of the trigger. Everything else waits for Sunday. If a headline cannot be expressed as a change to one of the seven lines, it is not information you can act on, it is atmosphere.
The failure modes of the individual readings are worth knowing before you trust your own sentences: five indicators people misread covers where four of these seven break.
The twenty-minute version.
Most people will not do seven lines every week. A short version that survives contact with real life beats a long one you abandon in month two. Do three: dominance with BTC's own direction, open interest with price, funding percentile. Those three are the ones that change fastest and carry the most weight for the coming week.
Be clear about what you lose. Dropping MVRV and the flow lines costs you cycle context â the slow question of whether you should be carrying size at all. That question does not change week to week, so run the full seven once a month and the short three the other weeks. That is the version I have actually kept up, and it took a couple of abandoned attempts at the long version to admit it.
Context and references.
A weekly indicator checklist works because it forces discipline against impulsive trading. CoinDesk and Bloomberg Crypto have both endorsed structured review cadences in trader education content. The base structure: read seven indicators every Sunday, write one sentence per indicator, then act only if the cumulative read changes existing position.
The seven indicators in this checklist: (1) BTC dominance trend, (2) ETF net flow direction, (3) funding rate distribution percentile, (4) open interest week-over-week change, (5) Coinbase Premium sign and magnitude, (6) MVRV cycle position, (7) Fear & Greed index reading. All are available free from Glassnode, Coinglass, Farside Investors and alternative.me.
The discipline of writing rather than reading is the key. The Block and Glassnode research desks both publish weekly checklists in their respective newsletters â the format works because it forces the analyst to take a position rather than passively observe. Traders who maintain the same cadence personally report similar improvement in decision quality.
Practical caveat: weekly cadence is for cycle-positioning decisions, not for trading signals. Day-to-day decisions require shorter timeframe inputs. The weekly review is a position-management overlay, not a replacement for execution discipline. SoSoValue and Kaiko both publish higher-frequency feeds for execution-layer needs.
Crypto assets are volatile and not suitable for every investor. This page is editorial analysis, not financial advice.