Bitcoin cycle signal history

How the references are selected

Each top reference is the highest daily close within ±30 days of its original historical anchor date. Each bottom reference is the lowest daily close within ±45 days. Signal prices and reference prices use the same daily closing-price series; these are not intraday highs or lows.

The original anchor dates and window widths are retained. These windows were chosen with knowledge of market history, so this correction makes the price comparison consistent without making the experiment out of sample. The reference set includes both cycle extremes and local extremes, including the June 2022 stress low.

Summary by signal type

Positive timing means the event appeared before its matched reference close; negative timing means it arrived afterward. Price distance is the average absolute percentage difference from that reference close, calculated only for matched signals.

Peak Candidate and Top Turn events can match within ±30 days of the corrected top reference; Bottom Watch events within ±45 days of the corrected bottom reference. Confirmations can match from five days before through 45 days after their corrected reference. These scoring windows are separate from the windows used to select reference closes around the original anchors.

Price distance among time matches

These counts show how many matched signals were also within 10% or 15% of their reference close. The two tolerances are descriptive checks, not calibrated success criteria or evidence of trading profitability.

Peak Candidate matches

This warning can precede the reference high by days or weeks and may occur at a materially lower price. A time match can still leave substantial further upside.

Top Turn matches

This reversal signal requires a decline from the tracked high and a break below the trailing average. Its distance from the eventual highest close can be substantial.

Bottom Watch matches

Bottom watches identify a zone; their price can remain well above the eventual lowest daily close.

Top Confirmed matches

Structural confirmation requires a 30% decline from the tracked high. Its timing and price distance show how much of the move had already occurred.

Bottom Confirmed matches

Recovery confirmation waits for both time and rebound evidence. A recovery from a local low can still be followed by a lower cycle low.

Why confirmation is later

Top Confirmed arrived an average of 22.2 days after its reference, with an average absolute price distance of 38.1%.

Bottom Confirmed arrived an average of 31.0 days after its reference, with an average absolute price distance of 20.0%.

These transitions record evidence that a structural move has occurred; they are not intended to predict the exact extreme. A confirmation associated with a local low does not establish that the final cycle low has passed: the June 2022 low was followed by a lower low in November.

Limits of this backtest

The reference set is small, several observations come from the same broader cycle, and the 2025 high remains provisional. The model was developed with knowledge of historical Bitcoin behaviour, so these results are not a clean out-of-sample experiment. Provider history, proxy construction and threshold choices can all affect the result.

This is a replay using the available provider history, which can be updated or revised. It is not an immutable record of the inputs and signals actually available on each original day. A forward track record requires those original assessments to be preserved separately; a historical replay cannot establish that a displayed signal was issued live.

Trading-return comparisons are intentionally outside this report. Translating signals into portfolio performance would require explicit assumptions about execution, fees, taxes, slippage, time out of market and user behaviour; a tiny trade sample would invite false precision.

Read how cycle models fail, inspect the methodology, or follow version changes.