Ethereum remains rangebound as institutional investors continue to dump ETH from their portfolio

• Ethereum has been consolidated between $1,240 and $1,440 but managed to breach through the year-long downtrend.
• ETH is yet to find enough support to rally to $1,640, which is where the crucial support range lies.
• The altcoin noted almost $4 million worth of outflows, bringing the year-to-date net flows to negative $368.7 million.

Ethereum was expected to be every wallet's favorite cryptocurrency this year, thanks to the hype surrounding the Merge. However, since the event failed to deliver, ETH has been under attack, particularly from institutional investors. This cohort is seemingly keeping as much away as they can from ETH.

Ethereum? No thank you

According to the most recent weekly report from CoinShares, this week, like the ones that came before, was an absolute disappointment. Registering only $12 million worth of inflows as of October 14, institutional investors have been pulling their hand from investing.

This behavior can be attributed to the persisting bearishness in the crypto market, except this behavior only extends to Ethereum.

While Bitcoin and other assets noted inflows, Ethereum alone observed almost $4 million worth of outflows last week. This brought the month-to-date net flows to negative $6.2 million and the year-to-date flows to $368.7 million. 

Institutional inflows week-over-week

Despite having one-third of Bitcoin's worth of Ethereum under the management, ETH currently has more in outflows in the last ten months than Bitcoin has in inflows.

Current market conditions

Investor apathy is the reason that the last five weeks of flows, be it inflows or outflows, represent less than 0.05% of AuM. Ethereum's price action verifies this, as the altcoin king has remained stuck within the $1,240 and $1,440 range for about four weeks now.

Ideally, ETH should be trading in the $1,640 to $1,760 range, as that would allow for ETH to mark a trend reversal in the long run. But in order to reach there, ETH will have to first flip the short-term critical resistance ($1,460) into support.

In terms of triggers, the price action did cross the 11-month-long downtrend line.

If ETH can sustain above this downtrend, it might be able to reach the aforementioned resistance level. If not, Ethereum's price could be looking at a return under the trend line.

ETH/USD 4-hour chart

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