Bitcoin is getting very close to the end of this bear-market transition.

Not because price has rallied for a few weeks, and not because sentiment has finally improved. There is a short list of signals that has appeared around every major cycle turn in Bitcoin’s history. Most of them are now lining up. One has not.

The clean confirmation is a break above roughly $83,000, and the timing matters as much as the price. Bitcoin needs to be above that level after the first week of October. Get both, and the market has overbalanced the bear move in time and price.

Until then, this is close. It is not complete.

The first confirmation is almost here

Overbalance sounds more complicated than it is. You are measuring whether buyers have managed a larger move, for longer, than any rally the sellers allowed during the decline.

The range we are measuring against runs from the February low to the May high. It tells us how far the largest counter-trend rally travelled and how long it lasted. The current move has to exceed both.

In price, that means above the highest point in the range — roughly $83,000. In time, it means holding beyond the first week of October. If Bitcoin goes higher before then, the price threshold moves with the high; the new move still has to last longer than the rally it is replacing.

This is how a market shows that sellers have run out of stock and buyers are taking control. It does not call the exact low. It tells you that the balance has changed enough for the next phase to begin.

Bitcoin’s current overbalance setup — above $83,000 after the first week of October is the line that matters

The low announced itself before the breakout

The working downside range was $57,000 to $43,000. Bitcoin touched the top of that zone near $57,000, but the more useful information was how it behaved there.

We got the three-bar signal from a significant low. On the daily and weekly charts, Bitcoin began printing higher highs and higher lows. Selling pressure did not expand even while the news around Bitcoin and MicroStrategy was ugly.

That matters. When bad news arrives and the market cannot go down, the news is no longer the thing in control.

The strategy was never to pick the bottom tick. It was to layer evidence as the transition developed, then take the trade when the reward became large relative to the remaining risk. The first signals gave the earlier entry with a greater chance of being wrong. The overbalance gives later confirmation with less upside left. That is the trade-off.

The previous cycle worked the same way. Bitcoin eventually travelled farther and for longer than the bear market’s largest rally. It then corrected, consolidated and only broke out properly months later.

The prior cycle — price and time overbalanced the bear market’s largest rally before the next phase began

If bad news hits and the market will not go down, that is information.

Greed is not the signal to chase

The fear and greed index is back in greed. Historically, greed has produced at least a pullback into fear. Extreme greed has almost always produced a reset into extreme fear, including during the early stages of a new bull market.

That is not a contradiction. A market can be transitioning from bear to bull and still drop hard enough to make everyone believe the breakout failed.

Look at 2019. Bitcoin moved quickly into extreme greed, then spent roughly six months coming back toward its earlier reaccumulation zones. The people who missed the first move bought late because they thought there would never be another chance. When the chance arrived, fear stopped them using it.

That is the difficult part of this setup. If the overbalance confirms, the next job is not chasing every green candle. It is waiting for the reset and watching whether the pullback produces a higher low.

Greed and extreme greed have repeatedly reset into fear before the next leg

The market still needs time to build a base

A sustainable bull market needs structure on the way up: breakout, consolidation, higher low, another breakout. If price goes vertical without rebuilding the base, the move can reverse just as quickly because there is no depth underneath it.

The 2023 transition required the same patience. Bitcoin broke the 200-day, approached the 50-week and then pulled back during the Silicon Valley Bank and regional-bank failures. Recession calls were everywhere. Bitcoin held, but the real breakout did not arrive until October — more than six months after the March scare.

The 2019 transition also spent months between the 200-day and 50-week moving averages before the market resolved. The pattern is not a straight line from low to high. The waiting is part of the signal.

So if Bitcoin confirms the turn and then spends three to six months frustrating everyone, that is not automatically weakness. A long, healthy reaccumulation is preferable to a thin move that takes off and dies.

The 200-day is done. The 50-week is next

Bitcoin has already broken the 200-day moving average with force and volume. That added real weight to the bear-to-bull transition.

Spot-exchange volume pushed to roughly $48 billion, taking out the June high near $47 billion. That is constructive, but the wider volume picture is not finished. A lasting move needs more money and more interest to return as resistance breaks.

Think of resistance as a wall. Tapping it with a hammer is not enough. The market needs enough force to knock it down.

The next moving-average test is the 50-week. The ideal sequence is a break, a pullback that holds above the important prior levels, and then continuation. That is how the 2015, 2019 and 2023 transitions developed, even though each one looked frightening in real time.

The 200-day break arrived with volume; the 50-week moving average is the next test

$83,000 is the clean line

The monthly swing chart strips the argument down further. Throughout the bear market Bitcoin has made lower swing highs. A break above one of those highs is the simplest evidence that the trend has changed.

The next one sits around $83,000.

That is why the same number keeps appearing from different methods. It is the top of the range required for the price overbalance, the monthly swing top, and the level that starts shifting the longer-term trend back toward the buyers.

If Bitcoin breaks it after the time threshold in early October, the cycle-low case becomes much stronger. If it pulls back first, the thing to watch is not whether the candle is red. It is whether the market forms a higher low and holds the levels it has already reclaimed.

The monthly swing top near $83,000 — the cleanest confirmation that the trend has changed

Stocks are slowing, not collapsing

The S&P has rebounded from what looked like short-term stopping volume, but it still needs sustained closes above 7,800 to get the move going again. A failure there leaves room for more churn and possibly another test around 7,600.

On the daily and weekly charts, the index has printed the three-bar slowdown signal from the high. On the weekly, the signal remains intact provided the close stays below the prior top near 7,783.

That is a warning, not a collapse call. The better comparison is the choppy topping behaviour through 2024 and 2025: correction, digestion, then another attempt higher.

The NASDAQ is also still holding its important 50% levels. For all the fear around AI spending, semiconductors and hyperscaler capex, the market itself is not confirming the full doom story.

The S&P’s three-bar slowdown signal — 7,800 is the level it needs to reclaim

The real-estate peak does not end stocks on the same day

The 18-year US real-estate and economic cycle is near its peak. That does not mean the stock market has to collapse now.

Stocks have generally continued higher after the real-estate peak. My working window is still late 2026 into 2027, with mid-2027 an important point to reassess how the stock market is behaving. In that sense I remain bullish over the next six to twelve months while also expecting the broader economic cycle to be forming a top.

Both statements can be true. Land, stocks and Bitcoin do not peak together, and forcing them onto the same date is how people end up correctly identifying the cycle while trading it badly.

The 18-year US real-estate and economic cycle — the stock market usually tops after land

Stablecoin dominance is lining up

Combined USDT and USDC dominance has rolled over in a way that resembles the end of the previous Bitcoin bear market. The earlier peak failed to hold, dominance returned to the range and then broke down.

If it moves a little lower and later rallies into a lower high, that could line up with Bitcoin pulling back into a higher low during the fourth quarter. USDT on its own is showing a similar sequence: peak, breakdown, retest and another break lower.

That would be a useful confirmation for anyone waiting to average into Bitcoin. The best setup would be Bitcoin resetting into fear while stablecoin dominance rallies weakly, fails below its prior high and turns down again.

The dollar is part of the same picture. It is barely holding 98. A decisive break lower could give Bitcoin more fuel; a hold would fit better with a slower topping process.

Combined USDT and USDC dominance — the breakdown that would support Bitcoin’s higher low

The rest of the market

Ethereum is still sitting near $2,500 without a breakout. Solana has pushed through the $105 level we were watching, while XRP is around $1.45 after reaching the 12-to-13-month window from its top to the August low.

Zcash has made a new all-time high, with Monero also showing strength. Privacy remains one of the clearer real-world use cases in crypto, even if it is the use case governments are least enthusiastic about.

None of that replaces the Bitcoin signals. It tells us where relative strength is appearing while the larger cycle turns.

The confirmation checklist

• Time and price — above $83,000 after early October — Both parts are required for the overbalance.

• Monthly swing top — roughly $83,000 — A break ends the sequence of lower monthly swing highs.

• 200-day moving average — broken on volume — The first major trend test is already behind price.

• 50-week moving average — the next test — A break and successful retest would strengthen the cycle-low case.

• Sentiment — greed now, fear later — The pullback is expected; the higher low is what matters.

• Spot volume — roughly $48 billion — Better, but sustained participation still has to return.

• S&P 500 — 7,800 — It needs closes above this level; otherwise expect more churn.

• US dollar — 98 — A break lower would add fuel for Bitcoin.

• Stablecoin dominance — watch the next lower high — It may line up with Bitcoin’s Q4 higher low.

The bottom line

Bitcoin is very close to confirming that the bear-market low is behind us, but close is not the same as confirmed.

The 200-day has broken with volume. The three-bar signal appeared from the low. Higher highs and higher lows have formed, and the market refused to fall on bad news. The final clean test is an overbalance in both time and price: above roughly $83,000 after the first week of October.

If that arrives, expect a pullback anyway. Greed tends to reset into fear, and the early stages of prior bull markets demanded three to six months of patience before the next major leg.

Do not get complacent because price is going up. Do not assume the move failed because the expected pullback finally arrives. Watch the structure: $83,000, the 50-week, the higher low and the return of volume.

That is how this ends — as a process, not a single candle.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — Bitcoin: This Is So Close To Ending (but don’t get complacent) (28:57)

PS. If the next move confirms the overbalance, the pullback afterwards may be the more important opportunity. That is the part I will be tracking most closely.

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We are not licensed financial advisors. All content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investing involves risk — always do your own research and due diligence. Information is accurate at time of writing but may change without notice. Read our full disclaimer here.

Back on 3 August I put out the video that started these warnings. We were watching for a breakout of the highs and a rally into $4,400 to $4,800, because there was buying accumulation at the lows and a tradable move available to test the selling pressure left over from the January all-time high.

That is exactly what happened. Gold broke out, rallied, tested the 50% level, and has now been rejected there. So the question for September is whether this is a sustainable move that consolidates and breaks higher, or a failed rally with more downside.

How far they have already fallen

From the top, gold fell 30% and silver about 54% peak to trough. After the moves we saw through late 2025 and early 2026, that is not out of the question. It is a normal correction for metals.

And be honest about the size of the trade since. The breakout was around 4,200 and gold sits near 4,370. That is roughly 4%. If you were trading it short term, good, it did its job. It is not going to change your life over the long term, and the long term is what I am focused on here.

Why I am not trading the fundamentals

I know the arguments. Central banks are buying, fiat is being printed away, cash has no value. I understand all of them.

But if the money is not actually coming into gold, you can throw the fundamental reasons away, because the market already knows them. What person does not know central banks buy gold? What person does not know currency is being printed? It is priced in. It gives you no edge.

Here is the awkward one for that argument. On a fifty-year view, central bank buying has actually fallen away in recent years compared with 2021 and 2022 — while gold kept climbing. So the cumulative purchases and the chart have been telling you different things.

What the chart is, is a historical record of human behaviour and where the money went. That is what I want to watch.

I would rather do what the chart is telling me with my money than what people want to hear.

The frenzies, and why silver topped when it did

There were two retail frenzies. The first ran into October, with people queuing outside bullion dealers around the world and fighting over stock. Those buyers are at roughly the same price today, twelve months on.

The second was December into January, and that produced the blow-off top and the cool down since. Silver did the same thing but far bigger.

I said beforehand that silver would top in the first four months of the year, usually Q1, because that is what silver has always done. Go back through it: Q1 top and a big decline, an April top in 2011, then Q1, April, April, Q1, April, April, Q1. One of them was a January top.

Every single time there is a different fundamental reason attached. I get told in the comments that I cannot discount this one. I do not know what to say except that the people buying the thing keep doing the same thing. Until human behaviour changes, and it has not in thousands of years, expect the same on a probability basis.

The clock: 16 to 19 months

After a top like this, gold has historically taken 16 to 19 months to give its answer. I usually just say a year and a half. Silver takes longer, more like one and a half to two and a half years.

2006 is the analogue I keep coming back to, because we are at the peak of the 18-year cycle now and real estate has been rolling over. Back then gold corrected about 25% top to bottom, consolidated, and the breakout came 16 months later. It ran to a new top.

Then the GFC arrived and gold fell 34% during the recession. It bounced back, held above a strong level, broke out again and ran to the 2011 peak. That final breakout came 19 months from the top.

The same counting works in reverse. The 2011 peak was the retail frenzy, everyone going crazy about gold, and 19 months later there was a significant breakdown. The game was over and people did not want to believe it. Then it died out for six or seven years.

Measuring from the January 2026 top: 16 months takes us to May 2027, 19 months takes us to August 2027. Call it mid-2027. Six separate instances say that is when the move confirms itself.

What strength actually looks like

2008 is the template for the bullish case, and it is worth understanding properly because it involved a breakdown first.

Gold broke down during the recession. Fine. There was an extreme fear bar, and then it bounced. Three months up, and it came back exactly above the 50% level. Then it broke swing tops. Then it consolidated above the 50%. That is beautiful strength, and it was then just a matter of patience for a few months before it broke out and ran to $1,900.

In every one of these cases the level that mattered was the 50% of the decline, measured top to bottom. And the rule I use is this: monthly bars need to hold above the 50% for two months in a row. That is what has worked before. Two months or more above it vastly increases the chance we are building a real foundation rather than another bounce.

So gold going lower from here is not the disaster people think. A lower low is not the major factor. What matters is whether it can get back above the 50% and stay there.

The bond problem

There is a genuine tension here and I am going to put it out there rather than pretend it resolves neatly.

The 2-year yield has reached a fresh 18 to 19 month high and is on the verge of a two-year high. The 10-year is at fresh highs and close to taking out multi-decade highs. The 30-year is at 19-year highs. Yields that high mean bonds are falling, and something is not quite right.

On one hand, that should send gold and silver up. Where else is the safe haven? Why would you buy US bonds?

On the other hand, you get a yield on bonds and you get nothing on gold.

I am not telling you which side is right. That comes down to your own investment thesis and how you want to play it.

And what the failure looks like

If gold fails at the 50%, tests it again and fails again, then we are likely testing the lows of the range.

That is what happened after both of the last blow-off tops, 1980 and 2011. Once the pattern set in it took about a year and a half — 19 months — and it ultimately broke down out of the trading range. And that range turns out to have been a distribution range: smart money selling into dumb money.

It takes time because gold is enormous, somewhere around thirty-odd trillion dollars, and you cannot distribute that quickly. So you get people hyped up on a pump, then it sells off. Accumulate, rally, test whether there is more selling than buying, and you can see the answer in the volume at the bottom of the chart. When it does not follow through, you get the decline.

The fundamentals at that time were just as loud, by the way. The Australian dollar was above the US dollar, trading around $1.10. Gold was going off, commodities were going off, it was all the rage. And bubbles do what bubbles do.

Silver has to lead, and it is not

Silver is the tell. Hide the bars and leave the swing indicator on and the direction is unmistakable: lower highs, lower lows. That trend is clearly down.

Look at what happened last time. Gold topped, and silver put in a lower high. That divergence was the weakness showing up before the rest of it. Gold was leading and silver was failing, and silver then took two and a half years.

So we could get a rally on gold that even takes out a new high, like 2011. But if silver is not making higher highs alongside it, then silver taking off toward $500 an ounce is unlikely. I would love it to happen and I know a lot of people who have bet their savings above $100 an ounce want it to happen. That is not a reason to expect it.

The right side through 2004 to 2006 and into the 2008 top was long, and you could see it plainly: higher highs and higher lows the whole way, one dip in 2007, then straight back to take out the tops.

For silver to get interesting again I want it back above $66, which is its 50%, and then above the next swing top. Do that and eventually put in a higher low, and it is a genuinely good sign.

The levels and the clock

• Gold now — $4,370 — Rejected at the 50%. The breakout was around 4,200, so about 4% of movement.

• The number — $4,791 — The 50% of the decline. He rounds it to $4,800. Two monthly closes above it is the test.

• Then — $4,900 — A slightly higher high just above. Hold both and $5,600 comes into play.

• The range low — $3,955 — A lower low is not the disaster. Failing twice at the 50% is.

• Silver now — $64 — Needs $66, its own 50%, then the next swing top.

• Gold’s clock — May to August 2027 — 16 to 19 months from the January 2026 top. Six prior instances.

• Silver’s clock — 1.5 to 2.5 years — It takes longer, and it took two and a half last time.

• Yields — 30-year at 19-year highs — 2-year near a two-year high, 10-year near multi-decade. Cuts both ways for metals.

The bottom line

Gold rallied into the 50% exactly as expected and got rejected there. That is the whole story for now.

What the bulls need is a higher low, more retests of the 50%, and ultimately monthly closes above $4,800 — two in a row is the standard I use. Get that and the odds of this running to whatever number you have in mind improve a great deal. Get rejected at 4,800 instead and there is more consolidation ahead, possibly lower, with an old zone back near $3,000 that once served as the buildup before a breakout.

Best case we are in a 2006 to 2009 setup. Worst case we are in 2011 to 2013. We will know within about a year and a half, and mid-2027 is where the history points.

One caveat on the number itself: 4,800 is live. If we make a new low, the 50% moves with it and I will update it at the time. That is how moving levels work.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — Warning for Gold and Silver in September (24:38)

PS. The free weekly reports cover the 18-year real estate cycle plus commodities including gold, silver and oil, and Bitcoin and stocks go out on Thursday. Link is at the top of the video description.

Inside TIA Pro we go through how we are actually navigating portfolios across metals, stocks, Bitcoin and real estate.

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August closed up 25%. That is the largest monthly gain since November 2024, nearly two years ago, and before that you have to go back to February 2024. Third best month in two and a half years.

Put that in context. Even through the bull market we rarely saw 25% months. In the 2022 bear market there was not a single one.

What is the same as January 2023

The last time we broke 20 to 30% in a month was January 2023, coming out of the prior bear. And that bar did several things at once: it broke the 200-day moving average on increased volume, the bar range expanded, and it closed in on the 50-week.

Those were the signs the bear market was ending and the transition was properly under way. Sentiment picked up alongside it, which is the part people forget.

The same shape shows up in 2019 breaking out of 2018. Increased volume, a break of the 200-day, charging through it. A 200-day has to be broken with a real push, like a bull going through a wall. And sentiment came raging back into greed.

2015 is a milder version but the same ingredients: a break of the 200-day, volume returning against the prior months, and it broke the monthly swing top.

And the one thing that is different

Here is the honest gap, and it matters. Bitcoin has still not broken a monthly swing top. That top sits at $82,800, call it $83,000.

In January 2023 the bar broke straight through November’s swing top and got close to the next one. We have not done that.

Breaking swing highs is the signal that buyers have taken over from sellers, because price is pushing past the points where it was rejected before. And through this entire bear market, no monthly swing top has broken. Not one.

So if it does not break out in September, that is fine, it can still correct. But we need $82,800 to go before we can say the buyers are back in control. That is the next signal, and until then this is unconfirmed.

These things are a process rather than an event. You do not lose the weight in one training session.

Against all odds, literally

The odds favoured a red August after a green July, which is why the title says what it says.

The honest version of that data: the only green Augusts came after green Julys, but a green July also produces plenty of red Augusts. So on its own it is a coin flip and not much use. What we actually leaned on was the plain probability of a green August, which was three in ten. It happened, and that takes the record to about 35%.

Now September. It has been one of the worst months historically, with six red Septembers in a row until 2023 broke the run. Then a marginal 4% green in 2023, 7% in 2024, and 5% at the bull market top. That is the longest green streak September has had.

A fourth would give us a green July, August and September together. A green quarter has happened twice in the last fifteen or sixteen years.

And this is where risk and reward actually lives. If the odds are against a move, you can still take the bet, but why would you put your whole net worth behind it? Play against the odds long enough and the maths wins.

The three days that changed it

Wednesday 19 August. On volume, Bitcoin broke the 200-day and closed above it, then followed through the next day.

I had been expecting a false move into the 200-day. We did not get one. When it is going to fail you usually see it test and test and test and then roll over. That is not what happened. Volume increased, the daily bar closed above, and it forced its way through.

Then it broke $71,000, which is the 50% of the entire bull market range. The chart puts it at 70,846. That is the number, and the follow-through came the next day.

Which is why the mindset had to change. We were looking for a lower low. We cannot hold that view just because October has not arrived and we have not had twelve months down from the high. If the data changes, we change.

If the data continues to change, then we have to change.

Rates are still heading up

The rate announcement is a couple of weeks away and the probabilities have swung back toward an increase, to 3.75% to 4%. October looks like a pause, then another hike in December at roughly a 39 to 40% chance.

Not much to trade off directly, but the direction matters. Rates ultimately going higher is exactly what the second half of the real estate cycle looks like, and that is playing out on schedule.

The order stays the same: US real estate and the economy peak, the stock market peaks after that, and I think Bitcoin peaks after that too. Unless it has already peaked and this is a lower high, which nobody can confirm yet.

The stock market composite cycles are not looking great into September and October either. That does not mean it is over for them, but the weakness is there and I think it reaches Bitcoin.

How far could it run

If the low is in, the obvious next question is where this goes. I have been public about this: I do not think we get the mega blow-off top.

Last cycle was somewhere around 700%. I do not expect another 700% off this low. From roughly $57,000 that would be absurd. A couple of hundred percent at best is my view, which puts you near $180,000.

And even that sits a long way above the overhead resistance Bitcoin has respected since 2021. The 2017 top, the early 2021 highs, the November 2021 top, late 2024 into early 2025, and then the 2025 bull market high which held above the line for a few weeks and ultimately failed. It tested again and failed again.

Will it keep holding? Wait and see. Right now there is no sign it wants to break above. If it does break and hold, come back to this video and tell me. That is the point of writing the levels down.

What September has to do

A run to $83,000 pushes price above the 50-week moving average, and that is when it really starts to swing in the bulls’ favour. Then you would expect consolidation.

That is the pattern every time. 2023: breakout in March, roughly six months of consolidation, then another breakout. 2019 into 2020: break of the 50-week, a big move, a normal pullback, then over a year of consolidation through the pandemic before it took off. 2015 into 2016: tested the 50-week, rejected, broke out again, consolidated above both lines, then ran.

If we get rejected instead, the level I do not want to lose is the tops around $67,000. It can spike underneath, put a wick in, and close back above the 200-day and above $71,000. That is still very bullish, it is just testing.

That path gives us a higher low, and a higher low here is absolutely fine.

The 200-day is at about 69,500 now and will likely rise toward 70,000 or 71,000 through September. So watch weekly closes above $71,000 for further confirmation.

Expect sentiment to fall apart first

We are at greed, close to extreme greed, and I think we are in store for a pullback. That is not a problem. It is the pattern.

Breakout, then a pull back into fear or even extreme fear, then it holds, then it breaks back above. After that it fades out into the consolidation and reaccumulation before the real move.

We talked about this three weeks ago, before the $67,000 breakout: we were watching for the same sentiment pattern to repeat. The breakout into greed came. Now we want the pullback. So far every step has happened on cue.

One caveat on language. When I say bull market, I do not mean a guaranteed huge break of the highs. It could be a major rally against the trend. Nobody knows that yet.

Stablecoin dominance agrees

USDT dominance is playing ball with the same bear-to-bull transition. You can see the test of the 50-week that happened back in January 2023, which coincided exactly with Bitcoin breaking the 200-day.

Look at what followed. Big push, good volume, a break above, a test of the 50, then a pullback into a higher low while the rest of the world was in extreme fear. That was Silicon Valley Bank collapsing.

And Bitcoin took off in the face of all of it. Two different kinds of low, both arriving with extreme fear across the global investment world.

The levels for September

• Bitcoin now — $78,986 — Up 1.61% on the day, after a 25% month.

• The next signal — $82,800 — The monthly swing top. Not one has broken in this entire bear market.

• Above that — the 50-week — $83,000 pushes through it. Then expect consolidation, not a straight run.

• The 50% — 70,846 — Bull market midpoint, already broken. Want weekly closes above $71,000.

• The 200-day — about 69,500 — Rising toward 70,000 to 71,000 through September.

• The line to hold — $67,000 — A wick under and a close back above is fine. A break and hold below is not.

• Rates — 3.75% to 4% — September hike back in play. December another at 39 to 40%.

• The ceiling — about $180,000 — A couple of hundred percent, not another 700%. And still above the 2021 resistance.

The bottom line

August did 25% in a month, which the 2022 bear market never managed once. The 200-day broke on volume and held, the bull market 50% went with it, and sentiment came back into greed. Every one of those matches January 2023, April 2019 and late 2015.

What is missing is the monthly swing top. $82,800 has not gone, and no swing top has broken in this bear market at all. Until that changes, this is a very good-looking transition rather than a confirmed one.

So September has a job. Break $82,800 and get above the 50-week and the odds shift properly. Fail, pull back into fear, hold $67,000 and put in a higher low, and that is arguably the stronger outcome anyway.

What I will not do is hold the lower-low view just because the calendar has not reached October. The data changed, so I changed.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — Bitcoin: It’s Turning (...against all odds) (22:38)

PS. I am covering how to find that underlying strength, and what the signals look like if we get there, in a video later this week.

And apologies for disappearing for four days. I was in Queenstown skiing, which was absolutely amazing. If you ever get the chance, go and give it a crack, skis or snowboard, whatever tickles your fancy. Back in the hot seat now.

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We are not licensed financial advisors. All content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investing involves risk — always do your own research and due diligence. Information is accurate at time of writing but may change without notice. Read our full disclaimer here.

Somebody bought a house on your street last month. Same bank as you, same loan, worse timing — and they are paying a lower interest rate than you are. Not because they negotiated harder. Because they are new and you are not.

That gap is the single most profitable thing an Australian bank does. And a falling market makes it worse rather than better, which is the part nobody talks about.

Two prices for the same product

The big four are advertising variable rates to brand new customers of around 5.69% to 5.74%. That is the front book — the shop-front price.

The average rate actually being paid across the outstanding mortgage book in this country is around 5.9%. Same banks, same products, different customers.

On a $700,000 loan over thirty years, your neighbour at 5.74% pays roughly $4,080 a month. You at 5.9% pay about $4,150. Call it $70 a month, a bit over $800 a year, for the crime of having signed earlier.

You did nothing wrong. You have never missed a payment. You are in fact the safer customer — they have years of your repayment history and it costs them nothing to keep you.

The Australian mortgage book is about $2.51 trillion as of June 2026. Every basis point sitting on that book is pure margin. And the cheapest margin a bank will ever earn is margin taken from a customer who is not looking.

The discount already exists on your loan. It is just switched off until you ask for it.

And the gap grows with time

The ACCC ran a full home loan price inquiry into exactly this, and nothing structural has been fixed since. It found loans between three and five years old paying about 58 basis points more than newly written loans, and loans ten years or older paying 104 basis points more. Not $104 — 104 basis points, a full percentage point on the entire balance.

I want to be fair about that: it was the inquiry’s measurement, not this month’s headline. What I would say today is that back-book tiers which have never been renegotiated typically run 30 to 50 basis points above what a new customer walks in and gets.

On genuine legacy products — old package loans, discounted products, loans absorbed in a bank merger and then forgotten — industry commentary suggests the gap can run well over a full percentage point. That figure is not independently confirmed, so treat it as commentary. But it would mean nearly two full percent difference on the same balance sheet, at the same bank, in the same week.

The mechanism is loyalty itself, and the banks are not hiding it. They are betting on inertia.

The trapdoor

So the obvious answer is to refinance. Walk out, take the front-book price. Here is what a softening market actually does to that plan.

Everyone frames a price fall as an equity story — your paper wealth drops, you feel worse, you get on with your life. That is not the real cost. The real cost is that a falling valuation is the exact thing that stops you leaving your bank.

Step through it, because it is purely mechanical. Refinancing requires a valuation. Your new lender does not take your word for it — they send a valuer or run an automated model over recent comparable sales in your street. In a soft market those comparables come back light. The valuation lands low, and your loan-to-value ratio goes up.

Cross 80% and the new lender wants lender’s mortgage insurance. In plain English, LMI is a premium you pay that protects the bank, not you.

And here is the bit that traps people. LMI is not transferable and not refundable. You already paid it once, years ago, to your current lender. That money is gone. If your new LVR pushes you back over 80%, you pay it again from scratch to the new bank. On a $600,000 loan at 90% LVR that is somewhere around $9,800 to $10,000. Across the market the bill typically lands between $5,000 and $15,000, and considerably higher on a large Sydney or Melbourne loan.

Run the maths and it looks grim. You are chasing a 40 basis point saving on a $700,000 loan — roughly $180 a month by his reckoning — and the switch costs you ten grand in insurance you have already bought once. You are almost five years underwater before the decision pays for itself.

The saving is real. It has just been priced out of reach by a valuation you had no say in.

And the number of people hitting that gate is moving. The share of borrowers presenting to refinance at an LVR of 91% or above went from 14% to about 20%. We do not have confirmed up-to-date figures, but the trend has kept running into 2026. One in five people trying to switch now arrives with essentially no equity buffer.

There is a second lock on the same door

APRA requires a new lender to assess you at your contract rate plus three percentage points. With new customer rates around 5.7% to 5.9%, a fresh application gets tested at closer to 9%.

Sit with that. To move to a lower rate, you have to prove you could afford a rate nearly three points higher than the one you are already comfortably paying. Your existing bank never retests you. You are already on their books. They just keep collecting.

Research from Mozo and Finder this year puts the scale of it at 36 to 40% of borrowers under pressure who cannot refinance externally at all. Mortgage prisoners — that is the term the brokers use. And 84 to 87% of brokers say they have clients in exactly that position, with serviceability named as the single biggest barrier.

So say it plainly: the softer market is not neutral for your bank. Every point your valuation slips is a point of leverage that keeps you from shopping around. A price fall does not just cost you equity. It hands your existing lender pricing power over you.

Nobody sends you a letter about this. There is no email saying your house is worth less so you are now a captive customer. It just shows up as the rate that never moves.

The honest counter-argument

I would be dishonest to skip this, because there is a genuine case the other way. On paper the Australian mortgage market is one of the most competitive in the world.

In 2025 there were 640,137 refinances, up 20% on the year before — the biggest refinancing wave on record and roughly 36% of total mortgage demand. And 64% of those people switched to a completely different lender. Brokers write most loans now, and comparison sites and digital applications have collapsed the paperwork. If you engage with this market, it works for you.

So I could be wrong about how bad the inertia problem is. It may be that everyone who cares has already moved, and the back book is simply people who cannot be bothered over seventy dollars.

But the argument turns on one number: internal refinancing. People renegotiating with the bank they already have. No move, no new application.

The ABS figures show internal refinancing up 14.9% year on year for investors, while the equivalent owner-occupier number moved 0.4%. Effectively flat.

Which tells you the banks are being selective about who gets the discretionary discount, rather than handing it out broadly. They are cutting rates right now. They are just cutting them for people who pick up the phone.

The ACCC measured this too, and again nothing structural has changed since: around 89% of big four variable rate customers were carrying a discretionary or package discount off the headline rate. Nearly everybody has one. It gets applied on request, or on the threat of leaving. Never volunteered.

Meanwhile loan commitments by number fell 5.4% in the June 2026 quarter. The flow of new customers is shrinking, which means the value of holding on to you just went up.

The two-sentence phone call

Do this part this week. Pull up your loan — not what you think you are paying, not the rate you signed at, the rate on your most recent statement, to the decimal place. Then look up what your own bank advertises to a new customer today for the same product, same LVR band, owner-occupier, principal and interest.

The difference between those two numbers, annualised on your balance, is your loyalty tax. That is the figure you have been donating.

Then the call. Do not ring the general line. Ask for the retention team or the customer loyalty team — those are real departments with real discretion and a real authority to discount.

Two sentences. Say them slowly, then stop talking.

One: “I’ve been offered a variable rate of X% elsewhere on a like-for-like loan.”

Two: “Can you match it, or should I start the discharge paperwork?”

Then go silent. Discharge is the word that routes the call, because it is the internal trigger for a retention save.

And if they say no, you have more room than you think, even in a soft market. As of their last publicly confirmed policy, CBA, Westpac, NAB, St George and Bank of Melbourne have all offered a streamlined assessment for like-for-like refinances — same loan amount, same term, no cash out — applying a 1% serviceability buffer instead of the full 3%.

Check it with your own bank, because these policies change. But it rewrites the maths above entirely: tested at around 6.7% rather than 9%. A whole cohort of people who assume they are stuck are not actually that stuck. They just never asked the right question.

On cashbacks, the majors have largely walked away but several non-majors have not, and are still paying $2,000 to $4,000 to take a loan across. That will not cover a ten-thousand-dollar LMI bill. But if your LVR is comfortably under 80%, it more than covers your discharge fee, your application fee and your valuation with change left over.

Run it in this order

• Step one — find your real rate — The rate on your latest statement, to the decimal, not the one you signed at.

• Step two — find their new-customer rate — Same product, same LVR band, same loan type. The gap is your loyalty tax.

• Step three — get one written quote — From a lender you would actually move to. Your call has no weight without it.

• Step four — ask for retention — Not the general line. Two sentences, then silence. Use the word discharge.

• If valuation blocks you — the 1% buffer — Ask about the streamlined like-for-like assessment before accepting you are locked in.

• Watch — the 91%+ cohort — If it climbs past 20%, more people fall behind the LMI gate every quarter.

The bottom line

Every number in this is a timing number. Your neighbour got the better rate because they signed at a different point in the cycle. Your valuation is soft because of where we are in the cycle. The LMI gate only exists because prices moved. None of it is random, and it has run in roughly the same sequence for more than 200 years.

Three things to watch from here. Whether that 91%-plus refinance cohort keeps climbing. Whether internal refinancing keeps growing faster than external switching — if it does, the banks are winning the retention fight cheaply, one phone call at a time. And get a free automated valuation on your own place from two different lenders’ websites and compare them, because they will not agree, and the one your bank uses is the one that decides whether you are allowed to leave.

That is your number. Not the national average.

Make the call, then post the two numbers in the comments — the rate you were on and the rate they gave you after you asked. No suburb, no personal details, just the two numbers. I genuinely do not think the average is telling the whole story here.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — Falling House Prices Just Trapped You With Your Own Bank (13:56)

PS. If this made you wonder where we actually are in the cycle, the free 18-year property cycle workshop covers exactly that — where we sit now and what has historically come next. Link is first in the video description.

I also cover charts, stocks, commodities and Bitcoin over on my other channel.

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TIA Market Notes · YouTube · X

We are not licensed financial advisors. All content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investing involves risk — always do your own research and due diligence. Information is accurate at time of writing but may change without notice. Read our full disclaimer here.

CBA, Westpac, NAB and ANZ write more than 70% of every home loan in Australia. Over the last few weeks of reporting season, all four said the same thing: Australians are applying for fewer mortgages.

If you own a home, are sitting on a deposit, or are carrying an investment property, the next twelve to eighteen months decide which side of this you end up on.

Why applications matter more than prices

An Australian house is not bought with cash. It is bought with a bank’s permission.

The median new owner-occupier loan is $731,000, down $4,000 in the June quarter and now falling for the second consecutive quarter. NSW still has the largest average in the country at $842,000, after a $19,000 fall over the quarter.

That number falling matters because a house price is never set by how many people want the house. It is set by one buyer with one bank saying yes to that price. Ten families can want a place in Sydney; only one turns up with an approval letter. At auction the final price is set by the last person still bidding.

So when applications fall 15 to 20%, the people disappearing are the ones who had the money. Take away the funded bidders and the final price comes down with them.

Put it in repayments. At the current average rate of about 5.9%, a $730,000 loan over thirty years costs roughly $4,300 a month. Before this year’s rate rises it was about $4,000. That is $340 a month, for the average borrower, on the same house.

And this reaches you even if you never intend to sell. Your home is not valued at what you think it is worth. Your bank values it off recent sales of similar houses nearby. If a house that sold for a million last year now gets a best offer of $900,000, that 900 becomes the number every house on the street is measured against.

The Reserve Bank is not coming

For two decades the answer to this was the RBA. Cut rates, people borrow more, buyers come back, prices hold. That is not happening this time.

The cash rate started 2026 at 3.6%. It now sits at 4.35% and has been held there in June, July and August — because inflation is still 3.8%, well above the 2 to 3% target.

So when is the rescue? On the banks’ own forecasts: CBA says May 2027, NAB June 2027, and Westpac and ANZ August or September 2027. The rate cut everyone is banking on is at least a year away.

And in its August statement the RBA said demand for new home loans has eased by more than expected — and still declined to step in. There is no rescue coming this year.

The investors already left

For twenty years the last bidder at an Australian auction was the investor. The May budget changed that.

From July 2027, negative gearing on established property goes. Buy an established property after budget night and you can no longer claim the losses against your salary — it only works if you build new. If you already owned before the budget, nothing changes for you.

The capital gains treatment changes at the same time. Right now an investor selling at a profit pays tax on half the gain. That discount is replaced with a minimum 30% tax on the gain, no matter when you bought.

The policy is a year away, so you would expect a year of investors holding prices up. They have not waited. CBA investor applications are down 28%, Westpac around 26%, NAB 17%.

Split those apart and it gets sharper. Applications for new builds — which keep the tax break — were down only 15%. Applications for existing properties were down 40%. Investors have run the numbers and stepped back from exactly the properties the change targets.

On top of that, the amount an investor can borrow on an established property has been cut by an estimated 10 to 20%.

Where the damage actually is

I read the comments, and a lot of you are thinking none of this is showing up where you live. Your suburb is fine. You are probably right — a property downturn never arrives all at once. It moves in a predictable order.

First the properties that rely most on borrowed money and tax breaks. Then the big cities where prices ran furthest ahead of wages. Last of all, the house you live in.

Right now: Sydney is down 5.8% from its peak, having fallen 1.7% in July alone. Melbourne is down 5.6%. Brisbane and Adelaide have both fallen two months in a row. Across the five biggest capitals the fall from peak is 3.2%.

Listings are up 36% on last year in Brisbane, 31% in Perth and 25% in Adelaide. Auction clearance rates in Sydney and Melbourne have dropped into the 40s and low 50s. A year ago they were above 70%.

By the time the national headline confirms a turn, it already happened months earlier in the lending. That is where we are.

Why it all clicks together

Rates rising during a housing shortage. A tax change removing the last bidder. More homes for sale while fewer sell, and the ones that do take longer. Prices falling while the banks post record profits.

None of that makes sense in isolation. It makes complete sense inside the cycle.

Property moves in roughly eighteen years — about fourteen up and four down. The framework holds across more than 200 years in the US and more than 70 in Australia. Count from the last major bottom around 2012, add fourteen, and you arrive at 2026.

The final couple of years into the peak is the winner’s curse: the phase where every last buyer pays the highest price with the lowest deposit at the worst possible moment. The government did it again last year, getting first home buyers into the market right at the top.

The fair case against me

I am not trying to sell doom, so here is the other side properly.

We still have a genuine housing shortage, which can hold prices up. Inflation can keep the nominal price rising even when the real price is not — those are two different things and it matters. The banks do not look to be in any trouble: CBA just posted a record annual profit of $10.9 billion. And consumer confidence lifted 6% in August after the RBA held.

So we might be early here. We have been early before. But being early with a plan beats being on time without one, and when you weigh it up, the negatives outnumber the positives at this stage of the cycle.

The three signals

• Lending — down 12% to 20% — Westpac -20%, CBA -15%, NAB -15%, ANZ -12%. First back-to-back quarterly fall in over three years.

• Investors — down as much as 28% — Investor lending down $4.2 billion in a single quarter. Existing homes down 40%.

• The market — -3.2% from peak — Five biggest capitals. Listings up over a third in Brisbane, clearance rates in the 40s.

• The cash rate — 4.35% — Held June, July and August. Inflation 3.8% against a 2-3% target.

• First cut forecast — May to September 2027 — CBA May, NAB June, Westpac and ANZ August or September.

• Tax change — July 2027 — Negative gearing goes on established property; CGT discount replaced with a 30% minimum.

What to actually do

If you own your home and the repayments are comfortable, you are in the strongest position of anyone reading this. If you want investment property later, look at refinancing now — not to draw money out, but to get your facilities in place while the banks are still lending freely.

If it is starting to get tight, run one number this week. What do your repayments look like if the cash rate goes to 4.6%?

If you bought in the last 18 months, or your fixed rate ends soon, this is the moment. Open your loan documents and find the exact date the fixed rate ends. Then test the repayment at 7% rather than 5.9%. If that number frightens you, start putting the difference aside every month until you have six months of repayments in cash. That buffer is the only thing standing between you and being a forced seller.

If you are saving a deposit, patience is working for you right now. More homes for sale, weaker clearance rates, and your position improves every month. But do not chase the first strong auction weekend — spring will produce one, and everyone will call it the bottom.

Go to open homes in the suburbs you actually want, and ask the agent two questions: how many days has it been listed, and how many times has the price been cut. You can check both yourself on the property portals, and sometimes that is the more honest answer.

If you are an investor carrying debt, understand precisely what changed. Established properties lose negative gearing from July 2027, the capital gains change applies regardless of when you bought, and borrowing capacity on them is down 10 to 20%. The deal now has to work on the rent coming in, not on a refund from the tax office.

The bottom line

Three separate forces are pushing the same way: lending down across all four majors, investors gone from established property a full year before the tax change bites, and a market with more stock and fewer sales.

None of it needs a crash to matter. It needs only for the last funded bidder to stop showing up, which is what the application data is already telling us.

The open question is which way it resolves. Do applications bounce back once buyers adjust to the new tax rules, and prices simply stall for a year? Or does investor lending keep shrinking into 2027 until the discounting spreads out of Sydney and Melbourne and into everywhere else?

Tell me in the comments — I read every one and reply to as many as I can.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — “Banks Finally FORCED to Admit Mortgages Are BROKEN” (11:57)

PS. There is a free 18-year cycle workshop that walks through the whole framework and how to put it into practice — the link is at the top of the video description and in the pinned comment.

I also cover charts, stocks, commodities and Bitcoin over on my other channel.

Get the free weekly report →

TIA Market Notes · YouTube · X

We are not licensed financial advisors. All content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investing involves risk — always do your own research and due diligence. Information is accurate at time of writing but may change without notice. Read our full disclaimer here.

Bitcoin has put in a $23,472 move from the 1 July bottom and $18,997 from the 1 August one — fifty-five days and twenty-four days respectively. Those are the biggest up bars we have seen since the bear market began.

The stock market is the part that does not fit. It broke down exactly where I said it would, and it still looks weak.

No, this does not confirm the cycle low

The question everyone has is whether the low is in, and the usual objection is that this bear market was too short. We peaked in October and bottomed in July. Bear markets typically run a year.

I agree with the objection. I also think there is no point fighting what the market is actually doing. Both things can be true.

So to be plain: I am not telling you the cycle low is in. There is no confirmation of it, and confirming a cycle top or bottom takes a long time.

What I come back to in these situations is macro lower highs and macro higher lows. At the bull market peak I was pointing at 108,000 — a breakdown through that was the warning the bull market was finished. We got the big leg down, then a failed attempt higher, then a break of some very important lows. That was the macro lower high. Then the market handed us a second one, and the bear market simply continued.

We need that in reverse. We have one higher low off the 1 July bottom, but it is not a major higher low on anything like a monthly timeframe. For a genuine cycle-low confirmation I want a sizeable reversal on the monthly chart — and any larger correction between here and there must not break the bullish structure Bitcoin currently holds. Then we start hunting for the macro higher low.

That takes a fair bit of time to unfold. Weeks, more likely months.

There is no point fighting what the market is actually doing right now.

What would put a dampener on it

Right now everything is up. Up bar after up bar, higher lows on higher lows, uptrends on the one-day one-bar, two-bar and three-bar. A lot of confluence.

The lead that changes it is the 50% at $78,000. Short-term changes of trend beneath that come first, and then a break of the swing bottom at $75,500 tells me the market is taking a breather and may try to fill some of this fast move. Below there, the higher-timeframe 50% is around $71,000.

There are some signs of an exhaust move, but take that with a grain of salt — you see the same thing in screaming uptrends that keep going. That is exactly why you want a confirmation trigger rather than a feeling.

On the upside, if the bulls hold above $78,000 the obvious place for sellers is the previous top from 6 May at around $83,000, which is not far away. Clear it and $87,000 is next, then $92,000.

One level at a time. There is no point thinking about 100K or whatever wild number is being thrown at you — it is genuinely pointless. Watch how the market behaves at each pivot, and if it slices through, look at the next one. Keeping it that simple is how you avoid getting carried away.

The S&P is the problem

Last week I flagged that stretch as no demand and distribution. We got the confirmation trigger I described, broke down from the swing bottoms, and have now continued down to the old highs — which is precisely where you expect price to land once a low goes.

The last 24 hours produced another suspicious bar. Suspicious for the bulls. It looks very weak, with declining volume again as the market tried to rally.

So if this current low breaks, we are almost certainly retesting the highs around 7,630, and likely carrying on to the 50% and the trend line at 7,580. Slice through that and it is a serious warning — though I would expect some buyers to step in there, as they usually do at a pivot. Below it, we are looking at the higher-timeframe trend line and possibly the lows at 7,325.

That is all short to intermediate term. On the higher timeframes there is no reason to think the stock bull market is over. It is the same argument as Bitcoin in reverse: it takes weeks and more likely months to break major support and then fail a rally into an old high. Until that happens you expect the bull market to continue, because it has done for about seventeen years.

Gold has hit resistance, and that is fine

Gold has run into a 50% level — but not the major one measured from the all-time high down to the low at 3,955. This is an intermediate level, taken from the lower high on 2 March. Look left on the chart and there is old selling pressure sitting around here too.

It is not a dealbreaker. Trends are up across multiple timeframes and this is headwind rather than a top. It may well push price down a little just to see how many sellers are around.

If it does ease, the next underside support is the old highs at about $4,500 an ounce, possibly the bottom of that range.

The thing I actually want to watch is volume. If price corrects and volume drops away, that is a very bullish continuation signal. I do not think the party is over for this advance, but I will let the market do the talking.

The real dealbreaker would be breaking back beneath that 50% and the old lows. That would print another major lower high from the all-time high, and it would be a serious warning that we are heading back to retest the lows and potentially through them.

Oil is the interesting one

A couple of weeks ago the story here was price rising on falling volume, which is usually weakness. It then made another attempt higher, hit resistance at the 50%, and printed a double top.

Since then we have had a sharp sell-off on a pick-up in volume — though nothing dramatic. Really it is just ping-ponging between the 50% levels.

Here is what makes it interesting. If crude holds support at the 50% and the trend line, and then breaks the very clear resistance around $87, that is my early lead for a significant amount of strength coming into oil. Which, unfortunately, would also mean things are not going well overseas. I am not going to get geopolitical — I am just reading what the chart is suggesting.

The other side: lower highs beneath $80 a barrel and this market goes back to sleep after the blow-off top in March. Then we are testing lows, with the old bottoms at $73 and potentially $67 beneath that.

Rangebound between the 50% levels for now, so all eyes on the next confirmation signal on either side.

The levels across all four

• Bitcoin, the lead — $78,000 — The 50%. Short-term changes of trend beneath it come first.

• Bitcoin, the break — $75,500 — The swing bottom. Below it, expect a breather and a fill of the fast move.

• Bitcoin, upside — $83,000 — The 6 May top. Then $87,000, then $92,000. One at a time.

• S&P 500 — 7,630 then 7,580 — Old highs, then the 50% and the trend line. Below that, 7,325.

• Gold, support — $4,500 — The old highs. Watch for volume to drop away on the correction.

• Gold, dealbreaker — the 50% and old lows — Beneath them is another major lower high from the all-time high.

• Oil, upside — $87 — Break it and strength comes in properly.

• Oil, downside — below $80 — Lower highs there and it sleeps. $73, then $67.

The bottom line

Bitcoin is strong and I am not going to argue with it. Trends are up on every timeframe I watch, and nothing has confirmed weakness — no swing break, not even a short-term change of trend. But strength is not the same as a confirmed cycle low, and the monthly reversal that would confirm one has not happened.

The stock market is where the caution is. It did exactly what the distribution signal said it would, and the rally attempt since has come on declining volume. Short to intermediate term it looks wrong, even though the bull market itself is intact.

Gold is in headwind rather than trouble, and oil is coiled between its 50% levels waiting for someone to pick a side.

So it is not all good news — but none of it is bad news yet either. Take the pivots one at a time and let the market tell you.

Wishing you more health, wealth and happiness.

— Michael

Watch the full breakdown — It’s not all good news. (10:56)

PS. If you want a closer look at how we are navigating this cycle across stocks, commodities and crypto, that is what the Investor Accelerator is for — the education, the Q&As, the live streams, and we go through our portfolios in there too.

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TIA Market Notes · YouTube · X

We are not licensed financial advisors. All content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investing involves risk — always do your own research and due diligence. Information is accurate at time of writing but may change without notice. Read our full disclaimer here.

Why aren’t stocks and Bitcoin collapsing at the peak of the 18-year US real estate and economic cycle?

It is a fair question and I get it in the comments constantly, so today is the whole answer. The short version is that a real estate peak and a stock market peak are two different events, separated by a year or more — and every cycle in the record says so.

First, what the cycle actually is

It is the US real estate and economic cycle. Put business in there, put credit in there, because that is what real estate is built on. It is not a stock market cycle and it never was.

You count from the low. Two big sections — the uptrend of roughly fourteen years, then a decline of about five to five and a half. The shortest full cycle on record ran about seventeen years and the longest around twenty-three, which averages out near 18.6. That is where the number comes from. I say eighteen because saying 18.6 every time would double the length of these videos.

Think of it as a road map rather than a timetable. You are going from A to B, there are roadworks along the way, sometimes it takes longer and sometimes less — but the route is the same every time.

One aside worth having. “Home prices” is the wrong name. The house depreciates. The land appreciates. It is a land cycle, and calling it a home price cycle scrambles your thinking about what is actually moving. I cannot get three hundred million people to change the word, but you can.

Source: Akhil Patel, Property Sharemarket Economics

Mid-cycle and end-of-cycle are different animals

This distinction does most of the work, and most people miss it.

The mid-cycle slowdown is not land-led. It is a financial event. The dot-com bust is the clean example: an enormous amount of credit poured into the market, everyone leveraged into the same trade, and eventually it blew up. Land had nothing to do with it. Our own mid-cycle was covid — though business conditions had been slowing from 2018, 2019 was sluggish, and there was one final peak before Trump stood up at the State of the Union in early 2020 and announced the US had never been stronger. Textbook timing. Then the money printing, and the second half began.

The end-of-cycle correction is land-led. Real estate prices themselves come down. That is the one we are approaching, and it is a different mechanism entirely.

The last two years of the second half have a name: the winner’s curse. Everyone has been winning for years, so everyone levers up, takes on more debt and expands — at the worst possible point in the cycle. It is the same mistake as going 100x long when Bitcoin was at $120,000 with no plan for getting out. Expanding is not the error. Expanding here is.

Nothing falls in a straight line

Before the timing, the simpler point — and judging by the comments I did need to make a video about it.

Markets rally inside downtrends. The stock market did it repeatedly through 2000 and again through 2008, including after the collapse was underway and before the final low. Gold did it violently in the 1980s: a huge rally off the low, then a collapse, then another huge rally, then another collapse.

So “the cycle is topping” and “prices go up from here” are not contradictory statements. They coexist in every single cycle in the record.

Where each asset class actually peaks

Line the S&P up against the real estate tops and the pattern is not subtle.

1972. Real estate peaks. The stock market peaks after it, then comes down, gets a big bounce, and makes its low around 1975 — roughly three to three and a half years from peak to trough. Then the new cycle starts.

1989. Real estate peaks. The stock market peaks in mid-1990. Then the recession, then a stock market low, then a higher low, then another.

2006. This one is clearest because the data is better. The stock market peaked 12 to 18 months after the real estate top. Then the correction, and then higher lows through 2010, 2011 and 2012 — an extraordinarily fearful stretch when everyone was certain it was all going to collapse again. It was in fact the opening of the cycle we are currently in.

So why do stocks keep climbing after land tops? Because the index is not a real estate index. Homebuilders and REITs are a slice of it. Energy, commodities, gold miners — those sectors are typically running into the peak, and they carry the index with them.

Stocks generally always go higher after the real estate cycle peaks.

Metals peak last

Gold boomed into the mid-cycle slowdown and then collapsed — it peaked in 1980, the mid-cycle was 1981, and it spent the next twenty years in a commodities bear market running to roughly 2000 or 2001.

But look at what it did near the 18-year peak in 1989 and the stock top in 1990. It found a base and tried to rally. It was showing relative strength while the wider market went through its recession and its fear. Then stocks took off, real estate had its run into 2000, and gold was simply not a wanted asset — down it went.

Then it took off into 2011. Which is after the US real estate top and after the stock market top. Same for oil, and copper too. Money flowing out of one place has to go somewhere, inflation picks up because business conditions have been good, and everyone wants the commodities that keep the machine running.

The honest caveat: a “peak” can look like several different things. The 1980s version was a counter-trend rally. It was never going to repeat that mega move after one that size — but it was enough to pause the downtrend and hold prices for years before the eventual collapse to the lows. Twenty years, all told. Whether we are in something like that now I genuinely do not know.

How we know we are near the peak

Construction spending and employment are two of the better tells.

Residential construction spending last cycle slowed through late 2005 and peaked in January 2006, while the stock market carried on into 2007. A clean early warning.

Non-residential — commercial — kept climbing from 2007 into 2008. That is why the last peak gets dated 2005, 2006 or 2007 depending on what you are looking at. Nothing tops on the same day. Dominoes line up, some fall faster than others, and they all reach the floor at roughly the same time.

That lag makes sense: the infrastructure committed to during the boom still has to get built. We are watching the same thing now with AI — the data centres and offices are in the pipeline regardless. So commercial may tick up again from here, maybe retest the highs, maybe make a slightly lower high. It has not rolled over yet.

Then 2008 to 2009 shows the sequence at the other end. Credit tightened through 2008, spending slowed, and it dropped hard after Lehman. Meanwhile the S&P bottomed in March 2009 and was already heading up. Non-residential spending bottomed in 2011, with a higher low in early 2013.

The order is: the stock market bottoms first, then real estate comes toward its low, puts in a higher low, consolidates, and only then starts climbing.

Real prices are already falling

This is the chart I would most like you to take away, because it is where the cycle is already visible even though the headline numbers say otherwise.

You have to watch nominal and real. In the 1970s real prices stagnated for years because inflation was high, and the 1980s were similar. With inflation elevated and rates possibly still going up — and I do think there is at least one more increase coming, though only the Fed knows when — the gap between the two matters enormously.

Last cycle, real residential prices peaked around 2006, collapsed into 2011 and 2012, and then recovered. This cycle, real prices peaked in 2022, double-topped through 2023 and 2024, and have been coming down since. The Q1 2026 reading is 156.43 on the BIS series and falling.

Nominal prices have kept going up the whole time. They made a high in Q3 2022 and have continued into 2026.

So adjust for inflation and housing has gone nowhere — and is now actively declining. Nominal values may well keep printing higher through 2027 and 2028 and it will look like the cycle is still climbing. In real terms it will not be.

Which is the whole question for a portfolio. Are you losing to inflation, holding with it, or beating it? That is the difference between a good portfolio and an average one from here. If you only ever look at the nominal line, you will not see this happening.

Source: Bank for International Settlements via FRED, Real Residential Property Prices for United States. Index 2010=100, deflated using CPI. Next release 27 August 2026.

Which brings us to Bitcoin

Bitcoin is at $78,494, and it has not broken $83,000 yet. It also still has to clear the prior top. As things stand it has not taken out any swing highs — though it did make a genuinely explosive move out of some significant levels.

So why is it not collapsing, given where we are in the cycle? Because the stock market has not broken down. No major correction, no breakdown in the big names. The S&P, the Nasdaq and the Dow are all still holding up. That is the thing in the title — it is the event everything else waits on.

The dollar helps too. It is heading down and having a tough time. Any break of 97 takes out the May 2026 lows and puts it in a weaker position again, which would be more fuel for Bitcoin.

As for how far: the current move lines up with the previous top around $120,000, and it could push slightly beyond — $130,000, $140,000, whatever it turns out to be. But whether you should be in it is a different question entirely, and it comes down to reward versus risk, risk-adjusted returns, and where else that money could go. That is not today’s video.

The sequence, and what to watch

• Real estate peak — 2025/26 — Where we are. The count runs 14 years up from the 2011/12 low.

• Stock market peak — 12 to 18 months later — That was the 2006 gap. In 1989 it was mid-1990. It has never been simultaneous.

• The trigger — stocks breaking down — Until the S&P, Nasdaq and Dow break, Bitcoin has no reason to collapse.

• Bitcoin — $83,000 — Not broken yet, and no swing high taken out. Currently $78,494.

• Bitcoin upside — $120,000 — Where the current move lines up with the prior top. Possibly a little beyond.

• US dollar — 97 — A break takes out the May 2026 lows and adds fuel.

• Real house prices — 156.43 and falling — Peaked 2022, double-topped 2023/24. Nominal still rising, which hides it.

• Commercial spending — not rolled over — Lags residential, as it did into 2008. The AI build-out is still committed.

The bottom line

Real estate peaking does not mean stocks collapse this year. In 1972, 1989 and 2006 the stock market topped afterwards — twelve to eighteen months afterwards in the case we have the best data for. Metals peak later again.

We are inside that gap now. Residential construction spending is rolling over and real house prices are already falling, which is what the top of a cycle looks like from the inside. But commercial spending has not broken, the indices have not broken, and until they do there is no mechanism forcing Bitcoin down in a straight line.

Which is why it can run from here, and why the stock market can make another high in 2026, without anything about the cycle being wrong.

Watch the nominal and the real side by side. That is the pair that will tell you what is actually happening while the headline number keeps saying everything is fine.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — The Collapse Will NOT Start Until This Happens (Bitcoin & Stocks, 18 Year Cycle) (29:37)

PS. If any of this is unclear, leave a comment on the video — I would rather clarify it there than have it half-land. And TIA Pro is where we navigate portfolios through this part of the cycle and get positioned for the next real estate low.

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We are not licensed financial advisors. All content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investing involves risk — always do your own research and due diligence. Information is accurate at time of writing but may change without notice. Read our full disclaimer here.

This one is a conversation rather than a chart session — an hour with Benjamin Cowen on his channel, walking through the 18-year real estate cycle and what it implies for everything else.

One thing to fix in your head before you read on: it was recorded on 19 August and published on the 25th. Every price below is from that day, which is the day before Bitcoin broke its 200-day. The framework is unaffected. The Bitcoin commentary is six days behind the market.

The shape of the cycle

The data behind this runs back to 1800 — roughly 220 years of US real estate sales — and it splits every cycle into three parts: a first half of about seven years, a second half of about seven, and then four years of peak and collapse. Fourteen years up, something breaks in the middle almost every time, then the unwind.

The current cycle began around 2011 to 2012. And I focus on the US rather than Australia because it is the biggest market in the world and where most of the money is. Everything else trickles out from there.

The first half is defined by nobody believing a cycle has started. Think back to 2011 through 2014 — wall-to-wall recession calls, Europe collapsing, Greece and Germany, the euro breaking up. Then you reach the mid-cycle peak, which ran from about 2018 into early 2020, and the slowdown arrives. The catalyst was covid. We never know what the catalyst will be. We only know roughly when the cycle sets us up for one.

From 2020 to 2022 you get the money printing and the pullback. Things get going again through 2023 and 2024. And the last two years of that second half have a name: the winner’s curse. Everyone has been making money, everyone wants more, everyone levers up. Which is what the major IPOs and the enormous construction projects are telling you right now.

Once everyone is in, you are at the peak. Same rule as Bitcoin.

Source: Akhil Patel, Property Sharemarket Economics

Where we are, and how bad it gets

On the US national average, we are at that yellow dot. Near the top.

That is an average, and there are markets inside markets. Plenty of US metros have been correcting since 2022, and some that everybody wrote off — San Francisco and parts of the West Coast — are bouncing back.

Ben asked the obvious question: does every one of these look like 2008? No. There is a roughly 40-year rhythm to the severity. 2008 was brutal. The 1989 to 1992 low was much milder. The one before that was harsher again. On that pattern this one should be less severe for the US, and you can already see why in the homebuilders — they are not sitting on the land banks they had going into the last peak, so there is less to blow up.

Australia may be the harder one this time. Nobody here believed prices could fall. Then the May budget landed and a light flipped: down 5 to 10% in some areas, and the top end down 20 to 25%. Rates have been rising since about February — three cuts last year, three hikes back to 4.35%, possibly one more, because inflation is still high.

In Sydney, anything over $3 million is down 20 to 25% in some suburbs while the bottom end holds up, because rate rises pushed buyers down into it. Melbourne is the one nobody wants to touch, which is exactly why it is where I am looking.

For the trough, work about four years from the peak. Call it 2029 to 2030 on the US national average.

The homebuilders lead everything

This is the part most people skip. Not many use the homebuilders as their signal for the stock market, which is fair — they are not the biggest companies. But look at what they did last time.

D.R. Horton peaked in 2005, made a lower high in 2006, another in 2007, and by the time the stock market topped in September and October 2007 it was already 60 to 70% down from its high. It had been screaming for two years.

It called the other end too. It bottomed and put in a higher low well before the S&P bottomed in March 2009. That does not mean it outperforms afterwards. It means the conditions are improving while the news is at its worst. That is where the opportunities are, and I was 23 or 24 at the time — if you are young now you genuinely have no idea what four or five years of that felt like.

So: D.R. Horton peaked in late 2024. Last cycle it was about 27 months from that peak to the stock market peak. Which puts me on watch for a stock market top somewhere in the first half of 2027.

I would be more confident once it breaks its lows. Below about $130 and it probably comes back to test the low and the halfway point, which the chart puts at $99.49. It is trading around $152 now.

Real estate tops first. Then stocks. Then metals.

Every time you go back through these, the order holds. Real estate peaks, then the stock market, then metals, then the broader commodities and energy.

The gaps are the useful part. Stocks topped in 2007, real estate in 2006. The Dow topped mid-1990, real estate around 1989. Stocks topped in 1973, real estate around 1972. And 1929 is the extreme case — real estate topped around 1926 and the stock market ripped for another three years.

So a real estate peak does not mean it is over. The shortest leads have been about a year to eighteen months, the longest multi-year. It means we are much closer to the end than the beginning. That is all it means, and it is worth a great deal.

Worth separating out the mid-cycle events too, because people conflate them. Mid-cycle slowdowns are financial rather than land-driven — the banking sector, or something like it. 2000 was the tech bubble clearing out before real estate could take its next leg. 1980 and 1981 was the US-Mexico default scare and the recession into 1982. 2020 and 2022 were covid and inflation, with Silicon Valley Bank in early 2023. Different animal to a cycle top.

The dollar, and a contrarian idea

The dollar has its own place in this. In the first half of the real estate cycle it generally rises; in the second half it generally falls. Higher lows from the 2011 cycle bottom, a run into 2022, and it has been coming down since.

Ben’s view is a lower high around 104 to 105 and then back down through the pre-election and election years. The chart supports the geometry: the 2022 high sits at 114.84, the halfway at 105.16, and the low at 95.48.

So if it reaches 105 — the midpoint of the entire range — and fails, it comes back to test those lows near 96. Get through 97 and a half and it is unlikely to beat the current peak around 101.6.

But here is the interesting one. Zoom out and the dollar has been in a huge trading range since the 1990s, with a single spike out of it in the 80s. If this turns out to be a higher low rather than a breakdown, that is the start of a move higher — which would be a genuinely contrarian outcome against everyone declaring the dollar finished and the BRICS taking over.

Gold has not topped. Silver is the question mark.

There are no signs yet that this is the high for gold. It has not broken any of the key levels. I have been treating this as a dead cat bounce inside a downtrend that needs to consolidate for the year.

The timing comes from the prior moves. Look at 2000, 2006, 2008 and 2011 — each of those ran roughly 16 to 19 months before the market gave its answer, breakout or breakdown. Measuring from this peak, that lands in the first half of 2027.

The test itself is simple. Hold above the halfway point on a monthly close and it breaks out. Fail there and it comes down. One prior instance closed a single month above, could not manage two, and eventually broke down. The 1980s did the same thing and collapsed in about seventeen months.

Silver I am less sure about. It has come off enormously — from a high at $121.65 back to about $65.63, with the cycle low at $64.78 just underneath. You had plenty of signals and plenty of time to act on the way down. I am happy to be patient rather than chase $55 or $65. Above $88 — the halfway of that whole range — and consolidating, and there is a good chance of another big move.

The bigger picture is worth stating plainly, though. Commodities have had 25 to 30 years of running. It seems unlikely they simply run another ten or twenty on the back of the narrative that the US is collapsing and central banks are hoovering up gold. One last push, and then quite possibly a long quiet spell — which is exactly what happened after 1980 and again after the 1987 to 1994 sequence.

What it means for Bitcoin

Remember this is the 19 August view, before the 200-day broke.

I think there is still a good chance Bitcoin rallies from here. Whether the low was July or comes in October, nobody knows. What I doubt is the size. Ben’s diminishing returns are real, and this may be one of those cycles where the move off the low is simply not big.

Do the arithmetic. Say $57,000 is the low. A 100% move takes you to about $120,000 — barely a new all-time high. Even 200% only gets you to $180,000, and that is hard to picture if credit is contracting, the economy is weaker than the data suggests, and the stock market turns down in a year or two.

I also think this will be a left-translated cycle. If 2026 gives us the low, the top is 2028 at the outside, with some catalyst in 2028 or 2029 sending things down. And there is already evidence it can happen: measured against gold, Bitcoin topped in 2024, not October 2025. It topped earlier against silver and against the stock markets too. The liquidity was leaving before the dollar price said so.

The other cycle I keep an eye on is the seven-year Shmita rhythm — a reset year roughly every seven. 2022, 2015, 2008, 2001, 1994, 1987, 1980. The next one is 2029, which sits right on top of the real estate trough.

The dates and levels from the conversation

• Real estate peak — 2025/26 — US national average. We are at the yellow dot now.

• Real estate trough — 2029/30 — About four years from the peak.

• Stock market peak — first half of 2027 — 27 months from D.R. Horton’s late-2024 peak, the same lead as last cycle.

• D.R. Horton — $130, then $99.49 — Break the lows and it tests the low and the halfway. Around $152 now.

• US dollar — 105.16 then 95.48 — Fail at the halfway and it retests the low. Through 97.5 and 101.6 likely holds.

• Gold — first half of 2027 — 16 to 19 months from the peak. Monthly close above the halfway decides it.

• Silver — above $88 — The halfway of the $121.65 to $64.78 range. Consolidate above it and it moves.

• Bitcoin — left-translated — Top by 2028 at the outside. It already topped against gold in 2024.

If you actually want to buy real estate

Understand your own area and pull at least ten to twenty years of data on it. If your area has been declining for around five years, that may be the place to start your journey. It does not mean it runs next year — consolidation and accumulation in real estate can take a decade, so you might be buying near the lows for something that moves in the early 2030s.

But do not wait for the exact bottom. This is the part people get wrong. At the bottom of a real estate cycle credit conditions are terrible, banks are not lending, jobs are hard to come by and wages are flat. Money is hardest to get precisely when the asset is cheapest. Getting finance is far easier while markets are still good, so have your position sorted before you need it.

The advantage over stocks is that you can add value to a property. With a stock you buy at the price and that is that. And on REITs — they consistently underperform. You get the exposure while leaving the upside to the people managing it, who take their percentage off the top first. It is the same argument as owning Bitcoin directly rather than through a wrapper. If you want in, get in properly.

The bottom line

The 18-year cycle puts us at the peak now, with the trough around 2029 to 2030. The homebuilders topped in late 2024 and, on the last cycle’s 27-month lead, point at a stock market peak in the first half of 2027.

None of that means sell everything tomorrow. Real estate tops first and the stock market has run past it in every single cycle — three years in 1929’s case. It means we are far closer to the end than the beginning, and that the patience required here is measured in years rather than weeks.

Gold and silver both give their answer in 2027. The dollar decides at 105 whether it retests 96 or surprises everyone. And Bitcoin can still rally without delivering anything like the last three cycles.

This is a good time to have a plan and a bad time to be leveraged into the winner’s curse.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — US Real Estate Cycles: Dubious Speculation with Jason Pizzino (58:39)

PS. I will be speaking at the ITC conference — Investing Through the Cycle — in Miami this November. If this is the sort of thing you want to go deeper on, come and say hello.

Thanks to Ben for having me back on. We will do it again in a few months.

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TIA Market Notes · YouTube · X

We are not licensed financial advisors. All content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investing involves risk — always do your own research and due diligence. Information is accurate at time of writing but may change without notice. Read our full disclaimer here.

Bitcoin is at $79,012 and up roughly 25% on the week. What I want to talk about is not the number, it is the shape of the move — because this looks like a lockout.

A lockout is what happens when a market runs away from the people waiting to buy it lower. The prices they wanted never arrived, and now the entry does not exist at any level they are willing to pay.

What a lockout actually looks like

It is a fast move that breaks the highs, and there are three things I want alongside it.

It has to come on volume. It has to come out of a tight, low-volatility range — and we had one of those from June onward, so tight that everybody knew something was coming. And the icing is a break of the 200-day, which we have, with the 50-week not far above.

The reason the range matters is that a range is either accumulation or distribution, and you cannot know which until it resolves. Tighter ranges generally favour accumulation, but the honest answer is that it was a probability, not a fact. Insiders could have been quietly offloading the whole time. The break above is what tips the weighting.

So this is what a lockout looks like: low volatility, tight range, then a break through the highs with real volume behind it. Whether it turns out to be the low is a different question, and I am not going to pretend I know.

They were waiting for lower prices, and those prices did not come.

We have seen this several times before

This is the part worth sitting with, because the pattern repeats and it repeats with the same emotional soundtrack.

January 2023. Bitcoin had been grinding around $19,000 to $20,000 for months. People were calling $14,000, $12,000, $10,000, and a few were calling $3,000 with charts of straight lines down and straight lines back up — which is simply not how an established market moves. Volume built, the 200-day broke, and everyone below was locked out. Then came the disbelief phase, the Wyckoff distribution charts, the recession calls. Even Elon Musk was posting that we were in one. The contrarian trade in March 2023 was that a major bull market was starting — announced by Silicon Valley Bank collapsing.

October 2023. Same break of the 200-day and the tops above it. That was the run where some fairly large YouTubers claimed to be short from $30,000 and to have held it to $70,000 without closing. I think that was nonsense, but it tells you what the mood is at these points.

April 2019. The cleanest example. Days of 0.1%, then 7%, then 0.09%, with volume falling away the entire time. Genuinely brutal to sit through. Then the energy arrived: one enormous bar, big volume, the highs gone and the 200-day gone with them. Everyone, myself included, wanted a pullback to around $4,200 for a safe entry. Because everyone wanted it, nobody got it. It just ground higher on higher lows and tighter ranges and then broke out again.

It happened again in late 2020 into early 2021, where price bled higher on higher lows with no meaningful pullback at all, then slammed through $20,000 and ran to $40,000. And back in 2015 and 2016, after a very long stretch between $150 and $300, it simply broke to $500 and never returned to the zone.

At the $3,000 low in 2018 the calls were for $1,800, then $1,000, then $1,200 — each one anchored to some prior level. None of them printed. That is the lesson: remain flexible, especially when a breakout is in front of you.

The number that says I am wrong

If this is not the breakout, the market has to break back below the prior double top at $67,000. That would make the whole thing one very large fake-out.

It is not far away, which is exactly why it is a good level. Easy to label, easy to follow, and it does not require anyone to interpret anything.

The other honest possibility is that this trickles out rather than fails. That is what happened in 2019 and 2020: the breakout catches people off guard, they buy in near the highs because they think it is running away, and once they have been caught the market goes quiet and sideways again while the next accumulation zone builds. Markets are very good at wearing out both sides.

Liquidations are back in balance

Six straight days of significant liquidations, with about $407 million wrecked in the last 24 hours alone.

The big one was the breakout day itself — roughly $3 billion total, and the split tells the story. About $2.74 billion of that was shorts against roughly $248 million of longs. The shorts were annihilated. Then more shorts the next day, and the day after, and only then did the longs start getting hit.

Which is how we have arrived at 49.71% long against 50.27% short — about as balanced as this gets. That matters more than it sounds. Balance brings smaller ranges and more stability, and you have seen exactly that over the last few days. The violence comes back when the book tilts hard one way again.

Volume is still the thing I want

Exchange volume has continued to climb and sat around $41 billion on 23 August. The data runs about a day behind, so treat it accordingly.

The signal I want is a break above the prior high near $47 billion. Without it, this is a spike that levels off, which is what happened repeatedly through the last cycle — a spike in October, another in November at the low, then volume fading away through a long accumulation before spiking again in early 2023.

And that length is the point. A longer, sustained accumulation is what fills the tank. That is the difference between a decent recovery and a run past — throwing a number out there — $180,000 to $200,000. Short-lived accumulation does not build that.

Right now the long-term structure has not come back. Volume has not, money has not, and social interest has not. Subscribers are down and views are down, globally, not just here. Bitcoin search volume has picked up, but crypto as a search term has collapsed to 13 — effectively the lowest of its five-year history, barring the 2023 low.

The same test applies right across the board: spot, futures, ETFs and treasury companies. Futures volume has been fading through this bear market. Spot ETF volume has been fading with a cumulative total only just turning up. Treasury companies are flat, because nobody wants to pay someone else to hold their Bitcoin unless the market is running. I want higher highs on all of them.

Source: The Block, Daily Exchange Volume (7DMA), updated 24 August 2026

Timing: strength into early September

Lined up against the 2018 and 2022 cycles, this still tracks 2018 fairly closely — and that comparison shows strength running into an early September peak before a pullback.

So watch for a local high around then. And to be clear about what a pullback means: it does not imply taking out the prior lows. It is just the up-and-down flow of a market doing what markets do.

Stablecoin dominance is rolling over

This one has been genuinely useful. Rising stablecoin dominance called the bear market — we were tracking it in October and December 2025 while it climbed. Now it is doing the opposite.

The pattern to know is the distribution top: it hits a high, pulls back hard, retests the high, and then breaks down. That is exactly what played out in 2022 into 2023, and it is what appears to be forming now at 6.94%.

If this continues, expect dominance to hold a range between roughly 6.5% and 9% for a while, the same way it did last time. The real trigger is a break below 6.5%. That is the one that says money is genuinely rotating out of stablecoins and into Bitcoin and crypto.

It will not be clean. Expect springs back up along the way, because nothing moves in a straight line — not Bitcoin on the way up and not this on the way down.

Ethereum: the tide has turned

What I care about for the shift from bear to bull is an overbalance in time and price, and Ethereum has now produced one out of this range. That is the tides turning. It is not a promise of a straight run.

It has overbalanced this move, broken back past the lows, and is pressing $2,479 — which is both the 50% and the prior high that rejected it. It closed at $2,474, right underneath. A break above confirms the short-term overbalance, and there are more levels above that before I would call it anything bigger.

Ethereum has a habit worth knowing: it does very little for a long time, and then moves in your face, usually right when you have stopped watching. And when it does go, there is often not much left in it afterwards. If you are trading, that window is where the money is made fastest. If you are holding, keep it in mind.

ETH/BTC is trying to hold ground and get back above 3.2%. It has outperformed since June and has not really given much back yet.

Solana: right where it needs to be

Solana is at $101 on Binance and about $100 on Coinbase — a dollar apart, which is a bigger gap than usual.

The level to watch is above $105 by mid-September. Hold that and it gives us the first overbalance in time and price, and it is sitting almost exactly where it needs to be to do it. That would suggest more to come.

Above there, $120 is the next one, just above the previous lows. Clear that and it sets up a move to $150, which is the 50%.

XRP: the timing keeps working

This is one I posted on Twitter a long time ago. Based on twelve years of history, the time windows pointed at a top in July or August — and XRP ran into its high in July.

So we counted forward. Twelve to thirteen months from the top gives you the next low, and the August low sits thirteen months from that top. It has done that rhythm over and over: roughly thirteen months of a run, with the ups and downs inside it.

If XRP does not break back above $3.70 from here, then the next step is to double the window — roughly 24 to 26 months to the following low, which it has also done many times. If instead this is the low, we head higher for the next twelve months or so, and mid-2027 becomes the date to watch.

On the weekly, the biggest rally off a low measures about 64 cents. This move is around 71, so we have an overbalance in price but not in time — that needs another couple of weeks.

Levels: it has taken out $1.70, and $2 is the real one. That is where the prior lows at $1.80 and the 50% at $2 sit together, and it is where the market was holding right before it snapped and broke down. Expect sellers there. Slice through and hold above it, and XRP is in a much stronger position.

The levels that matter

• Bitcoin now — $79,012 — Up around 25% on the week, through the 200-day on volume.

• Bitcoin, invalidation — $67,000 — The prior double top. Back below it and this was a fake-out.

• Exchange volume — $47 billion — The prior high. Around $41bn on 23 August. Without the break it is a spike.

• Long / short — 49.71% / 50.27% — Back in balance after $3bn of liquidations, most of it shorts.

• Stablecoin dominance — below 6.5% — Currently 6.94%. A 6.5% to 9% range first, then that break is the trigger.

• Ethereum — $2,479 — The 50% and the rejected high. Close above confirms the overbalance.

• Solana — $105 by mid-September — First overbalance in time and price. Then $120, then $150.

• XRP — $2 — Prior lows at $1.80 and the 50% together. Above $3.70 changes the timing model.

The bottom line

A tight range, low volatility, then a fast break through the highs on volume and through the 200-day. That is a lockout, and it has shown up at prior bear market lows in 2015, 2019, 2020 and 2023 with the same disbelief attached each time.

What I do not have yet is the volume on the longer timeframes, the money, or the interest. Those are what turn a lockout into a cycle rather than a squeeze, and $47 billion in exchange volume is the marker.

So the structure is a great deal better than it was in February, March and April, and better again than November and December. That is not the same as saying the low is in. Price can still trickle back down.

Watch $67,000 underneath, watch for a local high into early September, and watch whether 6.5% goes on stablecoin dominance. And remember that none of us gets this right every time. You need multiple cycles before you can recognise what real disbelief feels like, and even then it is a learning exercise right up until the end.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — Bitcoin: Locking OUT The Bears (and crypto ETH, SOL, XRP) (31:22)

PS. A commodities and stock market update is coming next. And if you have not seen it, the other channel covers the 18-year real estate cycle for Australia and the US — link in the video description.

TIA Pro’s sale has been extended and the lifetime discount is still on, though the price is going up. Members have traded this volatility well over the last few days — congratulations to those of you who did.

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TIA Market Notes · YouTube · X

We are not licensed financial advisors. All content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investing involves risk — always do your own research and due diligence. Information is accurate at time of writing but may change without notice. Read our full disclaimer here.

Bitcoin closed the week above $77,000 after a 24% week, and the mood across the market is disbelief.

Is this really the end of the bear market? Nobody knows that yet. But a lot of things broke this week that had refused to break all year, and they are worth going through one at a time.

What actually broke

Three things, and the order matters.

First, the weekly double top at $67,000. A double top is a bearish signal, and the market went straight through it. That flips it.

Second, $71,000 — the bull-market 50%, measured from the 2022 low to the 2025 high. Breaking it is good. Consolidating above it is what actually counts, and we have not done that part yet.

Third, the 200-day, and it went through on rising volume — the highest buying volume since the February low. Back in March, volume tried to do this and failed: price got to $82,000, could not clear the previous high, and fell to new lows. That is the difference between a rally and a break.

The 50-week average is next, and it sits just above.

The one thing that concerns me

The size of the bar. Abnormal weeks deserve suspicion.

But it comes off genuinely low volatility, which is the context that makes it make sense. Measured from the highs to these lows, the weekly range contracted about 43%. We normally want 65% to 75% before a low.

That sounds like a miss, except volatility keeps contracting after the price low — you get the breakout, then reaccumulation, and the range keeps tightening through it. So being short of the full contraction does not rule this out.

On the feeling that you missed it

This is the part worth saying plainly, because it costs people money every single cycle.

The confirmation always arrives after the low, and it always costs you something. That is not a flaw in the method, it is the price of the signal, and it is the same in commodities, in equities, in anything with a chart.

As for the noise: the people telling you that you missed the bottom at $57,000 are the same people who said it at $65,000, at $80,000, and at $115,000. If they were buying all the way down, their average price is somewhere in the $90,000s. There was far more money floating around up there than there is now — and we know that for a fact from the exchange, ETF and futures volume.

The people saying you missed it at $57,000 are the same ones who said it at $80,000, and at $115,000.

What the last three cycles did next

2022 into 2023. Broke the 200-day on the weekly with rising volume, rallied five weeks into the 50-week average, then pulled back and tested the 200-day — on genuinely awful news, with the regional banks collapsing. If we get an equivalent shock this time it would likely bite less, because that kind of story is no longer new.

2019. Same breakout on rising volume, up to the 50-week over about three weeks, and then it barely gave a retest at all. It tested the 50-week, printed the lowest of those three weeks, never got back to the 200-week, held, and broke out the following week. Then it went.

That second one is worth putting a number on. From the first breakout you had roughly 35% to 40%. Take both confirmations and it was about 140% from those two points. Not the whole move — but you do not need the whole move.

2015 into 2016. Broke the 200-week on rising volume, tested the 50, came back to the 200 and held just under it, then broke out again into the higher highs and higher lows.

Where things stand

• The close — $77,477 — A 24% week, through the double top, the 50% and the 200-day.

• The bull-market 50% — $70,846 — Broken. Now it needs to consolidate above, not just poke through.

• The line that undoes it — $67,000 — The old double top. Back below there and this was a short squeeze.

• The confirmation — $83,000 in October — Takes out the prior swing top and clears the 50-week average.

• Q3 so far — +31.67% — Against three red quarters of −23.28%, −22.04% and −14.18%.

• Volume — $37 billion — Seven-day average. Still short of the $47 billion printed in June.

The confirmation is still October

Nothing about this week changes the target. The overbalance in time and price still needs the first week of October above $83,000, because that is what takes out the prior swing top.

Depending which exchange you look at that is $82,200, $82,800 or a clean $83,000. It would also put price above the 50-week average.

So the question over the next few weeks is which script we follow. Do we reach the 50-week, get rejected, and come back to the 200-day like 2015 and 2023 did? Or do we hold up the way 2019 did before the runaway move?

Sentiment is almost at extreme greed

Fear and greed is nearly back to extreme greed, and this early in a cycle that usually resolves one way: a pullback into fear, possibly extreme fear.

That is what happened in 2019 into 2020. A quick two-month move of roughly 150%, and then sentiment had to wash all of it out, which took time.

The higher highs and higher lows we were watching for have now formed. If we do touch extreme greed, expect a swing back down — and the likely trigger is mechanical rather than fundamental. We have just had a short squeeze; the mirror of that is a long squeeze flushing everyone out.

A pullback in the S&P and NASDAQ into September or October would line up with exactly that.

The quarters argue against a new low

Q3 is currently running +31.67%, and historically Q3 is green about 56% of the time — not decisive on its own.

The stronger argument is what has already happened. This bear market has produced three significant red quarters: −23.28%, −22.04% and −14.18%.

Look back and two or three heavy red quarters in a row is typical. Four with large losses is not. In 2022 the damage was two real quarters — −56% and −15% — with the other two barely registering. 2018 was the same shape, with two big ones and two that did nothing.

With a month to run and the quarter already up this much, turning it into a heavy red quarter is a stretch. That would more likely be a Q4 event — and to get there you would need price back below $67,000.

Volume is still the ceiling

Volume has spiked to $37 billion on the seven-day average, which the exchanges will be relieved about after the year they have had. But it is still below the $47 billion printed in June, and overall exchange volume remains very low.

That is precisely why I have been cautious about anything much above $200,000. Spot volume, ETF volume and futures volume have all been thin, and a genuinely large bull market needs them back.

What I would expect into late Q3 and Q4 is a peak, extreme greed, a fade alongside the stock market, and exchange volume drifting back toward $14 billion — with price holding its ground above $67,000 and ideally above $71,000 while it reaccumulates.

The stablecoin dominance chart is worth watching alongside it. It has broken down through support at 8.2 and tested the prior low, which is bullish for Bitcoin. Expect it to base and bounce — and that bounce is where the Bitcoin pullback would come from.

The bottom line

The double top is gone, the 50% is gone, the 200-day is gone, and it happened on the best buying volume since February. Those are real signals, and they are the ones that failed every previous attempt this year.

The simplest test from here: if Bitcoin holds above $71,000 for another week — and particularly if it holds above it for August — that is a strong sign the July low was the low.

The full confirmation is still $83,000 in the first week of October. Expect a pullback before then rather than a straight line, because sentiment is stretched and the stock market looks due one.

And there is time for this in the wider cycle. The 18-year cycle is at or near its peak, but the stock market has not broken down yet, which means there is still room for Bitcoin to run before it does.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — Bitcoin: Brutal Bottom Journey In Disbelief..? (29:06)

PS. The TIA Pro sale has been extended briefly and the price goes up after. We are live with members this week to go through portfolio structure. Altcoin updates on ETH, SOL and XRP are coming next.

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Somebody sent me a post claiming life insurers were buying data-centre debt, bundling it with good assets to get it rated A-class, and that the government would step in and buy the defaults if it fell over.

It sounded exactly like the script from The Big Short. It also occurred to me that I had no idea whether any of it was true. So I went and looked, and what I found is more interesting than the post.

The question nobody is asking

Most people are arguing about whether this is an AI bubble. I am not that interested. When everyone is watching the same thing, it rarely breaks while they watch.

What I want to know is why the safest money in the world chose this moment to fund data centres.

And you cannot look at data centres without looking at land. Stay with me, because by the end they are the same story.

Land is the collateral

Land underpins the financial system. Not stocks, not Bitcoin, not gold. Land is what banks lend against, and the mortgage book is the largest single asset most banks own.

When land rises, banks lend more, people feel wealthier, governments collect more tax and spending goes up. The whole system looks healthy — but nothing was produced. When house prices double the country is not richer. It is the same house. That is a wealth transfer dressed up as growth.

Every major collapse began the same way. A boom in land prices, then a bust. The 1890s, the 1930s, Japan at the end of the 1980s, 2008. All of them land-led.

And when land did not fall, the downturns stayed mild. The early 1990s here in Australia, and the dot-com bust. Shares fell hard, firms failed, people lost jobs — but property held. The collateral survived, so credit kept flowing.

That is the difference between a recession and a crisis: whether the collateral survives.

Where that leaves the safe money

Prices have now stalled. In some countries years ago, in others growth has been minimal or quietly losing to inflation. Australia ran on longer than the US and UK, which is simply where we sit in the cycle — we always run later. We are moving out of stage five, the peak and winner’s curse, into stage six, the downturn. Real estate tops first, then the stock market, then the wider economy.

Here is how an insurer works. They sell you a policy, then invest your money in the gap between when you pay and when they pay out. For a life insurer that gap is 30 to 40 years, and most of their income comes from investing it, not from the premium.

So they need slow, boring, long-dated income that matches what they owe in 2058. For eighty years that meant property, mortgages and government bonds — and those bonds rest on a tax base built largely on land.

In other words, the money behind your life policy and your parents’ pension was a very long bet that land keeps doing what land has always done. That bet has stalled. The money still has to go somewhere.

Three routes into data centres

Private credit. A tech company building a data centre does not usually borrow for it directly. It sets up a separate entity that owns the building and does the borrowing — the same way a developer uses a new company for every project, so it does not consume the parent’s borrowing capacity. The parent then signs a long lease with its own entity and pays rent to use the building it just built, and that rent services the debt.

On its own a data centre is risky paper: it depends on the grid, on water, on chip supply, on demand nobody can forecast past about three years. But bind that entity to a long lease from a very highly rated tenant and the paper stops being rated on the building at all. It gets rated on the tenant’s promise to pay rent. That is exactly what happened with mortgages in the 2000s.

Selling the rent. Move the buildings and their leases into an entity, then sell bonds against the future rent. Nothing exotic — you can do the same with car loans. Billions have been raised this way, and the SEC has just exempted some data-centre bonds from parts of the rules, so the next deal is easier than the last.

Infrastructure. Canada’s national pension fund lent $240 million against a single Montreal data centre, put $1.75 billion into an operator, $4 billion alongside Equinix to buy one outright, signed an €8 billion European platform deal, and put another $1 billion into India. Well past $15 billion in about a year — and in the European deal they are co-developing, not just lending.

A company paying itself rent to service a debt which does not show up on its books.

The size of the pool

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ own page cites Preqin estimating the private credit market at $2.6 trillion by 2029, and BlackRock anticipating $4.5 trillion by 2030.

Not all of that is data centres, and I do not want to oversell it. But that is the pool — capital that has quietly moved out of things you can sell on a Tuesday afternoon and into things that take months to exit at a price somebody has to negotiate rather than look up.

Source: NAIC, citing Preqin and BlackRock private-credit forecasts

And here is the mismatch

Break a data centre into parts. There is well-located land, which behaves like land — it needs grid, water and proximity, and there is a genuinely limited supply of sites with all three. There is a building, which is a large shed and depreciates like one. And there are the chips, which is where the money actually is.

The hyperscalers depreciate chips over about five to six years. Michael Burry argues they are overstating it, putting the overstatement at $176 billion across 2026 to 2028. Nvidia has pushed back publicly, saying customers run four to six year lives and that six-year-old chips are still running flat out. The Wall Street Journal called it an accounting uproar, and nobody has settled it.

My point does not depend on who wins. The most valuable component in the building loses its value faster than almost any asset in commercial real estate — and the loans against it are structured like real estate loans, on real estate terms, with real estate assumptions about how the asset holds value.

On a twenty-year loan against a five-year chip life, that is fifteen years of loan with no chips.

There is a demand question on top of it. Hundreds have been built and many now sit idle — as little as 20% to 30% in use, against an official floor of 60. Nobody knows the total, because the deals were done privately. There is no screen to look at.

Which makes it a credit story, not an AI story

Think about the spot the safe money is in. Land has stalled. The asset it leaned on for eighty years is not doing its job. But the rules have not changed — the money still has to go out, still needs long income, still owes people in thirty years.

So it went looking for new ground, and found something close to perfect on paper: a huge build-out with long leases from the best-rated tenants on earth.

And notice that the constraint never actually changed. It is the same constraint wearing a different outfit. Well-located ground with power and water is scarce exactly the way well-located residential land is scarce. The building on top depreciates exactly the way a house does. Credit is expanding against the scarce part while pretending the depreciating part holds its value.

So the AI build-out is what the end of a credit cycle looks like when credit still has somewhere to go.

Which ties it to the other thing happening right now. At the end of a credit cycle money moves out of speculation and into necessities — food, energy, metals. And a data centre consumes power, water, copper, steel and concrete in enormous quantities. The build-out is not a separate story running alongside the necessities trade. It is another very large, very well-funded buyer competing for exactly the inputs that get scarce at this stage.

Four things that would actually tell us something

• Homebuilders — the canary — They sit closest to the land market and historically turn down before it does. They have not been healthy.

• Lease renewals — not announcements — New capacity announcements are marketing. A renewal is somebody recommitting with fresh information.

• Depreciation assumptions — and ratings — If how fast the hardware ages gets revisited, everything built on top gets revised with it.

• Necessities — do they keep leading — Energy, food and metals outperforming while property stays flat means the rotation is intact.

So what is actually true

Back to the original post, fairly.

Is the safest capital in the world piling into data-centre debt? Yes. Through all three routes, and it has been reported by the Financial Times, CNBC and Bloomberg among others. Not everyone is joining in either — Wellington has publicly passed on these deals over concerns about the property values underneath them.

Is that debt being rated in a way that may not capture how fast the hardware depreciates? That is a legitimate concern, and it is where any honest comparison to the mid-2000s comes from.

Is there a government promise to buy back the defaults? No. I could not find anything supporting that, and I would be cautious with anyone telling you otherwise. Insurers are regulated and there are protections for policyholders, but that is a very different thing from a guarantee on the investment.

And the bailout claim was never the interesting part anyway.

The bottom line

You do not need a bailout story for this to matter. You just need to understand that the collateral underneath the most conservative money in the world has changed — and that it changed at precisely the point in the cycle where you would expect it to.

If AI demand compounds the way everyone assumes, none of this matters. The leases get paid, the rent covers the interest, the bonds mature, and this was nothing.

But if demand stalls, or a cheaper architecture arrives sooner than expected, or one large tenant decides a lease is not worth renewing, the people who find out first will not be the people who built any of it. It will be the people whose retirement money was quietly standing behind it.

None of that is a prediction and it is not a reason to panic. This is about awareness. Once you have that, you can prepare — because cycles turn the same way nearly every time.

— Michael

Watch the full breakdown — Your Insurance Money Is Funding the AI Boom (23:50)

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Bitcoin closed at $72,995, up 5.31%, and it is now through the 200-day, the short-term 50% and the macro 50% at $71,000 — the midpoint of the entire bull run from the 2022 low to the 2025 high.

It did all of that on rising volume. That last part is the whole story, and it is what has been missing every other time this year.

Volume is the entire argument

Think back through this bear market. All the way down, every rally came with people announcing you had missed the low, buying the second day down and getting wiped out.

At $80,000 to $85,000 we had two months of it — you will never see prices under $80,000 again. The market then collapsed, took out $71,000, and bottomed in February. Then three months of the same talk into $82,000 and $83,000.

Through all of those rallies the volume never came back. And when it finally did, it marked the peak rather than the start — the same way it did in January. The double bottom failed at $98,000 and that was well and truly over. The next leg brought a bit more volume and failed at $71,000 immediately. Then in May it failed at the 200-day, again, and again, with a big volume day on the 14th that turned into a total failure and several days down.

Volume coming back but failing at resistance is weakness. Volume coming back and clearing resistance is not. That is the difference this week.

People can talk a lot of crap. I want to know what they are actually doing with their money.

The transition started in early July

The change began somewhere between 25 June and 4 July. There was plenty of negativity around and Bitcoin simply held its ground.

Then three higher highs and higher lows off a significant level, then three bars up, then three weeks up with no lower lows. That is not how a bear market behaves.

But I want to be straight about the limits of that. It tells me the tide has turned. It does not tell me the final low is in, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Nobody calls the exact top or bottom consistently across a career. What I want is a decent chunk out of the middle.

What actually confirms a low

The confirmation is an overbalance in time and price. At every cycle low the market starts spending more days moving against the old trend, and covering more ground, than it managed on any prior counter-move. That is the handover from net selling to net buying, and it shows up the same way at tops in reverse.

Measuring from the 1 July low, here is what that requires. Price needs to reach roughly $82,000 — technically just above $81,000 — and the move needs to still be running around 29 to 30 September to overbalance in time.

Which means the timing matters as much as the number. If Bitcoin sprints to $83,000 next week, that is an overbalance in price without one in time, and it does not count. What I want is above $83,000 in October.

Get that and you also get a break of the swing top, which is a macro higher high. Then if it retreats into late 2026 or early 2027 and puts in a higher low — maybe at $71,000, maybe at $66,000 or $67,000 — that is the setup for the next leg.

What has to happen, and when

• The close — $72,995 — Up 5.31%, through the 200-day and both 50% levels.

• The macro 50% — $71,000 — The midpoint of the 2022 low to 2025 high. Now beneath price and needs to stay there.

• The confirmation — above $83,000 — A break of the swing top and a macro higher high.

• The timing — October, not before — Reaching it earlier is an overbalance in price without one in time.

• Fear and greed — 72 — From 29 a week ago. Close to extreme greed, which is rare inside a bear market.

• Exchange volume — $14 billion — Ticked up, but still near the prior cycle’s $10 billion floor.

Sentiment has moved very fast

The fear and greed index now reads 72. It was 62 yesterday, 29 last week, and 33 a month ago.

That is a violent swing, and it is nudging extreme greed — which is genuinely uncommon inside a bear market. The last time we saw extreme greed on the way up was 2019, which produced a quick 300% and then died off.

So take it as evidence that something has changed, and also as a reason not to chase. These peaks in sentiment are exactly where the market has bitten people before.

Source: alternative.me Crypto Fear & Greed Index, 21 August 2026

The cycle-low indicators agree on timing

Layering MicroStrategy, XRP and Ethereum together gives a useful read, because those risk assets have run roughly 12 to 14 months from their peaks to their lows in every prior cycle. The forecast has been a low in Q3, and so far nothing has broken that.

MicroStrategy has now pushed past $105. That does not confirm its low, but it does suggest that if a fresh low comes, it will not be by much — likely in the $70s rather than anything dramatic. A close above about $121 would point at a higher low forming instead.

Watch for the excitement to fade around 21 September. That is where the timing lines up across all three.

What is still missing

Exchange volume ticked up but sits around $14 billion, still close to the roughly $10 billion floor of the last cycle. For a genuinely big bull market that has to come back properly. With eleven days left in the month, I want this month’s volume to close above last month’s.

And Bitcoin measured against everything else still needs work. Against the Dow and the S&P it has to break its highs. Against gold it has fallen back to the 2022 higher low, sitting near 16 ounces per Bitcoin, and against silver it is back at prior cycle lows.

Those pairs are where you see whether money is actually rotating back in. Higher highs there and this is a stayer. Lower highs and lower lows, and this was a bounce.

Expect a pullback regardless

Last cycle did exactly this. It broke the 200-day, took out a couple of highs, cleared the top of the prior accumulation in February 2023 — and then pulled back hard through March, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, regional banks followed, and everyone was drawing comparisons to 2008.

It was not 2008, because it was not that point in the cycle. That is the whole reason we track the 18-year cycle: it keeps you on the right side of the macro trend while the headlines are doing their best to shake you off it.

So if this is the start of something, expect it to pull back anyway. Lows are a process, not an event.

The bottom line

For the first time this cycle, volume has arrived and cleared resistance — the 200-day, the short-term 50%, and the macro 50% at $71,000. Every previous attempt failed one of those tests.

The confirmation I want is above $83,000, and I want it in October rather than next week, so that both time and price overbalance. Hold $71,000 in the meantime.

If that arrives, the bear-market low is very likely in and the next leg has started. If it does not, this joins the list of rallies that looked like the turn.

Either way, the odds are better now than at any point in the last nine months — and that alone is worth something after the year we have had.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — Bitcoin Breakout: NOW Is Different (and confirming the cycle low) (29:14)

PS. TIA Pro is on sale with the lifetime discount, and the price is going up. If navigating portfolios through the cycle is something you have been weighing up, this is the window.

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What has been coiling for two months has broken out, and it went with force.

Gold did much the same thing on the same day. Both moves came on abnormal bars with abnormal volume, and that cuts in two directions at once.

Bitcoin: the lockout bar

When a market coils like that, explosive moves are common, and their job is to lock people out. Plenty were waiting for lower prices, assuming every touch of resistance near $65,000 meant more sellers and an eventual slam back down. That is not what happened.

This is why I treat a sideways market as consolidation — neither accumulation nor distribution — until it proves itself. There is no value in being dogmatic about which way it has to resolve.

There was a lead, though. About a month ago the one-bar and two-bar timeframes turned up on the swing tool, and that is usually the precursor to the next degree turning up as well. Even while price was still correcting, the odds favoured it. That is what has now happened.

What I like most is that we broke on top of the 200-day and closed on top of it. What gives me pause is the bar itself. Abnormal range, abnormal volume — and markets do not like abnormal moves. The long-short ratio has swung badly out of balance too. So this is either genuine buying or a pump and dump, and it is too early to insist on either.

Markets do not like abnormal moves.

A wave three of a wave three

The structure is what makes this interesting. The absolute low came on 1 July, the first leg up ran into 21 July, and the correction bottomed on 1 August. Call that a wave one and a wave two.

Drop a degree and the substructure looks the same — another one and two, with us now inside the third. A wave three of a wave three, which is precisely the kind of thing that produces a move that locks people out.

That structure is invalidated if price drops back beneath the breakout zone at $65,500. The earlier warning is closer: the 200-day and the trend line sit around $68,500, and a four-hour change of trend beneath that would be the lead that we are heading back to retest the old highs.

On the upside, the 50% is just under $71,000, with another pivot around $71,500. Ideally price simply breezes through both.

Gold did the same thing

Gold has run hard too. This is one I flagged to members over a month ago, when the clues for accumulation were building — volume dropping away and the ranges getting tighter and tighter. Although, again, I treated it as consolidation until it proved itself.

It broke higher, reaccumulated, and has now produced the same kind of abnormal bar as Bitcoin: excessive volume and an excessive range. Same question mark over whether it is sustainable.

And the same structure applies. Gold is dealing with its 200-day just as Bitcoin is. The level to watch is $4,500 an ounce — a change of trend beneath that and things cool off. Hold above the old highs instead and the next pivot is around $4,700.

Thinking a step ahead: on the wave count this may be completing a substructure fifth wave, which would mean gold settling down and going quiet for a while rather than continuing straight up. Not what I am seeing yet, but worth having in mind so it does not blindside you.

The S&P did nothing, as warned

While all the attention was on Bitcoin, gold, currencies and yields, the stock market did very little — and is now three days down off an all-time high.

That was the warning I flagged last time. The volume through that consolidation was unusually low while price crept higher, which is a lack of demand, and a lack of demand at highs tends to end the move even if only briefly.

Big picture, nothing has changed. All the major trends are up and this is a sell-off rather than a top. The pivot remains 7,600. Break back beneath the old highs and see changes of trend under there, and expect at least another month of weakness before it is worth reassessing.

Oil is asleep

Crude has been the least interesting market of the four. It closed where it opened, at the same price as the day before, and volume has been falling away — a genuine lack of demand in the short term.

It is stuck between the higher-timeframe 50% around $88 and the support zone near $80. While it sits between those, expect it to whipsaw.

I want a clear change of trend on one side or the other before reading anything into it. The run up is visibly slowing, and the volume suggests it may slow further.

The levels across all four

• Bitcoin, the line — $68,500 — The 200-day and the trend line. A four-hour change of trend beneath warns of a retest.

• Bitcoin, invalidation — $65,500 — The breakout zone. Below it the bullish structure is gone.

• Bitcoin, upside — just under $71,000 — The 50%, with another pivot around $71,500 above it.

• Gold — $4,500 — A change of trend beneath and it cools off. Hold, and $4,700 is next.

• S&P 500 — 7,600 — Break beneath the old highs and expect a month or more of weakness.

• Crude oil — $88 and $80 — Stuck between them. Expect whipsaw until one of them goes.

The bottom line

Two big breakouts on the same day, both above their 200-day, both on bars that are larger than normal in range and volume. The structure is bullish and the trends are up, so old resistance should now act as support even if we correct.

But abnormal bars deserve respect in both directions. That is exactly why the pivots are worth having written down: $68,500 and $65,500 on Bitcoin, $4,500 on gold.

If those hold, the breakouts are real and there is more to come. If they do not, this was the pump before the sellers took control back.

— Michael

Watch the full breakdown — Bitcoin breakout of major resistance. (10:19)

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It happened. Bitcoin hit the 200-day moving average on heavy volume and closed above it at $69,314, up 7.12% on the day.

That is the single signal I have been waiting on for months. And it has arrived at a point in the cycle where it has never arrived before, which is what makes this interesting rather than simple.

What actually moved it

Two things. First the mechanics: after weeks of contracting ranges, a coil like that snaps. We got $3 billion in liquidations, one of the largest days since the October flush, and the bulk of it — about $2.7 billion — was shorts getting annihilated.

People had been loading up short into a market that kept refusing to break $62,000. That was never the place to be short, and it has now been paid for.

The flip side is already visible. The long-short ratio has swung to roughly a 6% differential the other way, which means the market is now crowded long. That does not have to matter today or tomorrow, but these things snap back toward equilibrium, and crowded positioning is how the next liquidation cascade gets built.

And the news behind it

The second reason is the US Treasury announcing it will increase buybacks of long-dated government debt. Yields pulled straight back.

The 30-year had just touched a fresh 17-year high and has dropped to 5.19%, a fall of about 1.37%. Note where that landed — almost exactly on the support from the October 2023 lows. The news arrived right at the level.

Which is worth keeping in proportion. Bonds have been falling since early 2020, over six years now, and there have been significant counter-trend rallies the whole way down. For this to be a genuine low, the long bond would need to overbalance in both time and price — rallying past 127 somewhere around mid-2027.

So the problems have not gone away. They have gone under the covers for a while, which is what markets do best. They climb a wall of worry.

Why this time looks different

Here is the part that has genuinely surprised me. In every prior cycle, the 200-day broke after the low was already in, and after the 50 to 52 week mark. We are at week 45, about ten months in, and it has broken now.

We have seen tests and fake-outs above the 200-day before, but early in a bear market — early 2018 — not this late in one.

And the volume still is not there. Look at what happened at the real cycle lows: monthly volume was already building into the low, then the breakout came with volume, carried through the prior highs, and closed strongly. Every month after that closed above the accumulation zone. That is what a real transition looks like, and we do not have it yet.

I expected us to get close to this line and then fade. Instead we are through it. That either means the low is in earlier than the pattern suggests, or this is the false move we were talking about yesterday.

Which makes this the test

The rule from yesterday applies directly. A false move confirms itself with a close back below the level, fading out over the following weeks.

In 2014 price tested the 200-day, broke above, closed above it for a couple of days, and then failed. It happened twice on that run. Typically you get only one or two days of follow-through before it rolls over, and on one occasion it took about three weeks from the high before the final break down.

So bulls need consolidation here, not just a close. Hold above the 200-day and build, and this becomes the transition. Slip back under it and fade, and it joins the list.

What has to hold

• The close — $69,314 — Up 7.12%, above the 200-day at roughly $69,000.

• The 50% levels — $70,800 to $71,300 — Short-term and macro together, plus the top of the breakdown bar. The real hurdle.

• The next test — $82,000 to $83,000 — Prior high and prior lows. Clearing that is a much stronger position.

• The invalidation — a close back below — That is what confirms a false move, and it usually fades over the following weeks.

• Liquidations — $3 billion — About $2.7bn of it shorts, with positioning now crowded long.

• 30-year yield — 5.19% — Down 1.37% from a 17-year high on the Treasury buyback news.

Sentiment finally turned

The other signal I have been tracking is the fear and greed index, and it moved out of neutral and printed its first day in greed on the close.

That matters because it was the missing piece. The transition markers started back in late June, on the 24th, 25th and 26th, when the market first began trading better. Then the $57,000 low, where Bitcoin could barely push lower even with MicroStrategy falling and plenty of fear around. Then three bars up and three weeks up off the July low.

Lots was turning, but I could not call the low without this. Now we have higher highs and higher lows forming on sentiment, which is the shape that showed up at the last two cycle lows.

The honest caveat: historically the false sentiment signal also arrives within four to six weeks of the low. It did in 2022, in 2019 and 2020, and in 2018 right before the last dump. So this being close in time is the good news. It does not settle which side of that window we are on.

The bottom line

The 200-day broke on real volume, shorts got cleared out, and sentiment turned. Those are three of the things I have been waiting for, and they arrived together.

What is missing is time and follow-through. This is earlier in the cycle than any prior 200-day break, the volume on the longer timeframes has not shown up, and a close back under this level would make it the false move rather than the turn.

So watch $69,000 underneath and $71,000 above. Consolidation above both is the confirmation. After that, $82,000 to $83,000 is the level that changes the picture properly — and even then I would expect a pullback, because that is how every new cycle has started.

I may have to eat my words on the timing. I would rather that than miss it.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — Bitcoin: It Happened! ...but this time looks different (21:22)

PS. This week’s reports went out Tuesday. I have also recorded a real estate cycle update for Ben Cowen’s channel, which should be out in the next couple of days.

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We are not licensed financial advisors. All content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investing involves risk — always do your own research and due diligence. Information is accurate at time of writing but may change without notice. Read our full disclaimer here.

Four markets this week — the S&P, gold, oil and Bitcoin — and every one of them is sitting on a level that decides the next move.

Bitcoin is the quietest of the four and the most interesting for it. It is coiling.

The S&P broke out, then stopped dead

The S&P cleared three tops sitting at the same level and ran hard into new all-time highs. Then, for a week and a bit, nothing.

The reason I am cautious is the volume. Since the breakout it has been close to non-existent — the lowest of the year, outside the holiday stretch around New Year when it always drops. One small rally, then sellers taking hold and pushing price back down.

The saving grace is that after a break to new highs, coming back to retest the old tops is completely normal. So the level that matters is 7,600.

Hold it and the bullish read stays: a retest on decent volume — high, but not excessive — a bounce, and a higher low would point at fresh highs sooner rather than later. Break back beneath it and I would expect this market to go dormant for at least a month before it is worth reassessing.

Gold’s fourth-time breakout

Gold has gone the other way entirely. Three highs at the same level, a higher low holding support, and then an explosive move through on the fourth attempt — with silver coming along, as it usually does.

The volume pattern is what I like most about it. A big up bar on rising volume locks people out of the market, and although volume has eased since, it is still running above where it sat in the weeks before the breakout.

Now it is taking a breather at the next 50% level. The number to hold is $4,200 an ounce — that gives plenty of room for a correction while keeping the structure intact.

If you lean bearish here, the early leads come first: a change of trend beneath about $4,430, then beneath the last swing low near $4,360. Those are the precursors to a run at $4,200, and possibly through it. Bear in mind the higher timeframe trend is still technically down, with macro lower highs and lower lows.

Oil is telling you about geopolitics

Crude is around $84 a barrel — light sweet, not Brent, though the structure mirrors it if you follow the other one.

It has climbed back on top of the March and April lows just under $80, which puts it in a slightly stronger position, and it is still making higher lows off the December bottom.

This is why the chart is worth watching even if you never trade it. Back when oil broke down, the peace talks followed and the price collapsed. Now it is creeping the other way. A change of trend above $88 and I would expect things to flare up again — more strikes, more disagreements, higher prices.

For the opposite read, you want changes of trend beneath $80 and a lower high under it. That would suggest some stability, at least for a few weeks.

Bitcoin is a rubber band

Bitcoin is at about $64,000. The all-time high was $126,000, which puts the halfway point at $63,000 — and price has been snapping back and forth across it ever since it first touched it.

Each swing is tighter than the last. It is a coil winding up, or a rubber band being stretched, and it cannot go sideways forever.

On the upside, a break above $65,000 to $66,000 followed by a higher low opens the next pivot at $70,000 to $71,000, with a trend line and the 200-day to get through on the way. On the downside, losing $63,000 points at the lows near $58,000, and through those you are looking at the low 50s and possibly $48,000.

One caution on markets like this. When a coil finally goes, a big move that closes back inside the range is usually a false break and the last flush before the real reversal. Wait for the higher low above, or the lower high below, before deciding it is real.

False breaks happen time and again, and they are getting more prevalent as algorithms take more of the market.

The levels across all four

• S&P 500 — 7,600 — The old highs. Below it, expect a month or more of going nowhere.

• Gold — $4,200 — Holds and the structure stays bullish. $4,430 then $4,360 are the early warnings.

• Crude oil — $88 — Above it, expect things to flare up. Beneath $80, expect some stability.

• Bitcoin, upside — $65,000 to $66,000 — A break plus a higher low opens $70,000 to $71,000.

• Bitcoin, downside — $63,000 — Losing it points at $58,000, then the low 50s toward $48,000.

The bottom line

Gold is the one showing genuine strength, on volume, with room to correct before anything changes. The S&P has the move but not the participation, which makes 7,600 the level worth caring about. Oil is quietly building a case that things get louder overseas.

And Bitcoin just keeps winding. There is no point taking a view until it actually breaks and holds — the setup either side is clear enough that you do not need to guess which way first.

— Michael

Watch the full breakdown — Bitcoin: It’s winding up. (11:29)

PS. Most of what I am doing now happens with members rather than on YouTube — live streams and the trades as they go on, lately in gold, sugar and Meta. That is all inside the Investor Accelerator.

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Bitcoin is coiling. A couple of green days, no break of the highs, no break of the lows, with the 200-day sitting just overhead and the 200-week right underneath us.

Something is winding up. But the more useful question is what shape it takes when it goes, because every prior cycle answered that the same way — and it was not the way most people were positioned for.

Week 45, and what happened last time

We have completed 44 weeks from the high and are into the 45th — 315 days, and about 51% down from the October top.

In 2022, week 44 gave the second-lowest close of that bear market and week 45 gave the lowest. Then came a rally. Between roughly weeks 45 and 52 the market pushed up into a lower high, and only after that did it crash into the actual cycle low.

2018 did the same. Week 44 was the second-lowest weekly close, then a rally into a lower high, then the collapse. 2014 put its lowest weekly close on week 44, consolidated, rallied around week 50, and that rally failed straight into the final low.

Three cycles, three false rallies, all in the same window we have just entered.

The false move is really a sentiment event

Here is what makes it dangerous. Those lower highs look like nothing on a chart. Zoom out and they are barely visible. But while they are happening, the volatility picks up and people start believing the low is in.

In 2018 the price flatlined for about two months with daily bars of a few hundred dollars — genuinely nothing happening. Then sentiment climbed out of extreme fear, into fear, touched neutral, and got a single day in greed. Higher lows and higher highs, on a very short timeframe.

A couple of days later it took out every one of those lows and ran down to the $3,000 low, with sentiment back in extreme fear.

Expect the next four to six weeks to test you the same way.

This cycle has already done it twice

You do not need history for this one. It has happened twice in front of us already.

The collapse to $80,000 was followed by a run to $98,000, which was sitting right beneath all the prior lows — textbook resistance. Sentiment ran from near the floor up toward 60 and straight into its own downtrend. That was the fourth attempt at that level, and it failed, and price fell to $60,000.

Then it happened again on a smaller scale, with sentiment nudging into neutral right at the peak before the next leg down.

The point of showing these repeatedly is simple: you get trained to recognise it, so you are not the one buying the top of the fake rally.

The false move is only confirmed when it breaks underneath the lows.

What could make this one different

One genuine difference is worth flagging. In every prior cycle, the 200-day broke after the low was in, and after the 50 to 52 week mark. We are at week 45 and the 200-day is only 6.6% overhead at about $69,500.

For reference, here is how close price got to the 200-day before the low in each prior cycle: about 13% in November 2022, around 6% and then 8% in 2018, and 4% to 5% in 2014.

So being this close is not unusual at all. Actually breaking it here would be, and that has not happened before at this point in a cycle. It is worth watching day by day rather than assuming either way.

The levels that matter

• Support — $62,000 — The significant floor for this range. A break there changes the read.

• Price now — about $64,500 — Coiling between the 200-week below and the 200-day above.

• The 200-day — $69,500 — 6.6% overhead. In prior cycles it only broke after the low was already in.

• The bigger tell — around $83,000 — Where the more meaningful sentiment confirmation sits, above the 200-day.

• Exchange volume — $14.9 billion — Fresh lows. The last time it was under $15bn was the start of the 2022-23 bull market.

• Daily range target — $200 to $800 — Where the average true range has sat around prior cycle lows.

The genuinely positive part

Sentiment is on the verge of making higher highs and higher lows against its own downtrend, which is the shape that showed up at the last two cycle lows.

Remember late 2022 into early 2023. Bitcoin jumped 3%, then nearly 6%, then 5% in a matter of days, and everyone decided you had missed the bottom and were an idiot for waiting. With hindsight it was not dramatic at all — it was simply the price of confirmation, arriving alongside the 200-day break.

That confirmation came a couple of months after the low, not at it. Which is exactly why the sequence matters more than the tick.

Volume is still the missing piece

Exchange volume has broken to fresh lows at $14.9 billion. The last time we were under $15 billion was right at the start of the 2022 into 2023 bull market, when it kept creeping lower before the explosive move.

The average true range is still contracting across the daily, weekly and monthly, which is what happens into cycle lows. The daily needs to work toward $200 to $800.

Whatever this coil resolves into, it needs volume behind it to be worth anything. Without that, a move through $67,000 is just the false move with a better costume.

Stocks are lining up too

Worth noting alongside. The S&P has just printed three bars down off an all-time high — the same signal we had at the May top, which led into months of weakness and July’s low. The NASDAQ has cooled but is not at an all-time high, so it is the less concerning of the two.

The 1996 composite has a correction into September, and the Fed meets that month with the market expecting a hold while the dollar and the yields argue otherwise.

The dollar sits near 99.5 and has not broken 98.5 or the prior low at 97.5. Until it does, a retest toward 101 or 102 is live — and a stronger dollar is another headwind for Bitcoin here.

The bottom line

We are at week 45, which is precisely where the last three bear markets produced a rally that convinced people the bottom was in, and then took out the lows.

So treat strength from here as unproven until it holds. The false move confirms itself on the downside, when price breaks back under the lows — not on the way up.

Watch $62,000 underneath and the 200-day at $69,500 above. Mid-September, around the seasonal turn on the 21st, is where this should start to resolve.

And for what it is worth, the deep targets doing the rounds — $20,000, $30,000 — do not fit the data. The declines into these lows have been smaller than the ones off the highs, every time.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — Bitcoin: Beware of This False Move (24:12)

PS. If you want to work through the cycles across stocks, real estate, Bitcoin and commodities as the 18-year cycle turns, that is what we do inside TIA Pro.

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Interest rates are at fresh highs and the bond market is forcing the Fed’s hand. Meanwhile the stock market is sitting somewhere quite precarious.

Both of those things have happened together before, at this exact point in the cycle, and what followed was not what most people expect.

The order these things happen in

We are at the peak of the 18-year US real estate and economic cycle. The part that matters for equities is the sequence: across more than 200 years of data, the stock market always tops after real estate does.

Line up the real estate peaks — 1972, 1989, 2006/07, and now — and the equity top comes later each time. In 1989 real estate peaked and the stock market did not peak until 1990.

That is why standing at the property peak does not mean selling equities today. It means the clock has started, not run out.

Cycle research: Phil Anderson and Fred Harrison, drawn from US and UK data

The bond market is telling the Fed

The 30-year government bond yield has broken to fresh highs, pushing past 5% with less noise than the earlier attempts — which is the character you want to see in a real breakout rather than a spike.

The 2-year has rallied to 4.3% while the Fed sits at 3.5% to 3.75%. That is a long way apart, and the gap is the message.

Bonds are falling and yields rising because the market believes rates need to go higher. The Fed has not moved. This is the usual order of things — the bond market decides first and the Fed catches up months later.

The bond market eventually tells the Fed what to do. The Fed usually gets the message a little later.

Rising rates are not the sell signal people think

Look at what actually happened last time we stood here. Through the 1990s into the dot-com boom, rates went from 3% to 6%, were cut back to 5.25%, raised again, cut again, and then raised one final time into the peak before the recession arrived.

The same shape turns up around every cycle top. Rates rise to cool the excess, a few cuts come near the end, and only then does the recession follow. There were cuts just ahead of 2001, and again just ahead of 2007.

And remember 2022. The argument then was that higher rates would break the market. Rates went from 1.5% to 2.5% to 3.5% and the market ripped anyway, because the economy was not collapsing. Rising rates can simply mean things are strong.

The 1996 shape

Set the decade offset to 30 years and you are looking at 1996. Before anyone runs too far with that: I am not saying we have four more years of bull market. I am saying the shape has been tracking, and tracking closely.

1996 put in peaks around May and June, cooled off, made its lows in July, then rallied hard into new highs. That is broadly what this year has done.

What comes next in that overlay is a top around late August — the 23rd, in 1996 — followed by a correction back to test the highs, and possibly the lows. Then, oddly, a green September, a minor October high with a pullback, a strong November, and a December that closes near where it opened while being volatile inside.

The NASDAQ version is cleaner still. It showed weakness earlier than 1996 did, but the rallies out of March and April made new all-time highs and the timing since has lined up.

Run the overlays yourself →

The weakest month into the strongest

The seasonals back the same path. Across 125 years, September is the statistically weakest month for the S&P at 45.6% green — the only month that loses more often than it wins.

December is the strongest at 72.2%. Running straight from the worst month into the best is why the fourth quarter so often carries the year.

None of that guarantees green. It does mean a September dip into a Q4 run is the base case rather than the surprise.

The numbers to hold onto

• September — 45.6% green — The weakest month of the year for the S&P across 125 years of data.

• December — 72.2% green — The strongest, which is why Q4 usually does the heavy lifting.

• Typical correction — 10% to 15% — The range through the equivalent stretch of the dot-com run.

• The outlier — 22% — One deeper drop, but it never broke the prior lows. It tested them and closed back above.

• The 30-year — above 5% — Fresh highs, while the Fed still holds at 3.5% to 3.75%.

• The 2-year — 4.3% — Well ahead of the Fed, and that gap is what eventually closes.

How big a correction, if one comes

Through the dot-era stretch the S&P corrected mostly 10% to 15%, with a single 22% drawdown. The important detail is that even the 22% never broke the prior lows — price came back into the zone around the old highs near 970, tested it, tested it again, closed above, and then ran on.

The sequence went 10 to 11%, then 10 to 11%, then about 13%, with some single-digit dips along the way, and roughly 13% again at the final top — which then took six months to form a lower high before things properly broke down.

The NASDAQ ran hotter early with a couple of 25% corrections, then settled into a rhythm of 13, 13, 14, 14, 11, 13, 14 and 13 through the last twelve to eighteen months of the move.

So a correction from here would be ordinary. A correction that takes out the prior lows would not be.

What the volume is saying

One thing worth watching on the way up. Near highs, when the down days start carrying noticeably more volume than the up days, the decline that follows tends to be a longer one.

That is what we flagged in May with the three-bar signal — lower highs and lower lows on rising volume, which said the professionals were selling into it. The market then went nowhere for months, which it needed to, because the run before it was close to 20% in about six weeks and one of the fastest on record.

We have now broken out of that consolidation and the last couple of down days have not picked up pace. So this is either building a local top before a rollover, or consolidating above the highs before the next leg.

Either way I do not think this is the end of the move up. More likely it hands us a better entry through Q3 into early Q4.

The bottom line

Real estate has peaked, and equities have historically topped after it rather than with it. The bond market wants higher rates and the Fed has not caught up — which is the pattern at every one of these cycle tops, not a warning on its own.

The 1996 overlay, the midterm composite and the monthly seasonals all point the same way: weakness from late August into September, then the strongest quarter of the year.

Expect something in the 10% to 15% range somewhere in there. Watch whether it holds the prior lows, because that is what separates a pause from a top.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — Stocks Are Repeating A Shocking Path (18 Year Cycle August Update) (24:14)

PS. The 18-year cycle report goes out today, covering interest rates, the bond market and real estate in more detail. TIA Pro members have the live portfolio session tomorrow morning.

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PPS. This month marks 16 years since I started in the stock market, back in August 2010. The cycles have been the one thing that kept working the whole way through.

TIA Market Notes · YouTube · X

We are not licensed financial advisors. All content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investing involves risk — always do your own research and due diligence. Information is accurate at time of writing but may change without notice. Read our full disclaimer here.

Bitcoin has just put in the second-lowest weekly close of this bear market, and we have started week 45 from the top.

That sounds like a small detail. It is not. The same thing happened at the same point in every prior bear market, and what came next was consistent enough to plan around.

Week 44 is not a coincidence

Count the weeks from the cycle top. Somewhere around weeks 44 and 45, every prior bear market printed either its lowest or second-lowest weekly close. Our lowest so far came near week 37; we have just closed week 44 as the second lowest.

In 2022 the run from the November top was 45 weeks. Week 44 gave the second-lowest close, week 45 the lowest. In 2018, week 43 was the second lowest, then 44, then 45 — the same window. In 2014, a longer bear at about 59 weeks total, the lowest weekly close still landed at week 45.

Three bear markets, three different sets of buyers — retail in 2013, retail then the futures launch in 2017, treasury companies this time — and the same shape. Could this one be different? Possibly. I am happy taking the other side of that.

What comes next in that sequence

The pattern from here is uncomfortably specific. A minor rally into a lower high. Then the ranges contract hard. Then one final capitulation dump into the cycle low, with the candles at their tightest.

That contraction is the leading indicator. The confirmation comes afterwards, when price breaks the 200-day moving average — which is what happened in 2023, in 2018, and in 2014 into 2015 where it broke, retested, and broke again.

So you get warned by volatility and confirmed by the moving average. Not the other way around. And we are still being rejected at $66,000.

The volatility targets, as promised

I said I would put numbers on the average true range this week, so here they are. Two rules sit underneath all of it: volatility always tops after the all-time high, and always bottoms after the price low.

On the monthly, the range falls 12% to 18% from its high by the time the cycle low arrives. November 2022 came in around 18%. We are down 14% now, so we are already inside that band, and 18% would take it near $14,000. After the low, accumulation drags it down toward $10,000 to $12,000.

On the weekly, it runs 65% to 75% from the range high to the price low. We are down about 46% — not there yet, but moving quickly. The target band is $2,500 to $3,500 a week. We are at roughly $5,400.

On the daily, it is 85% to 95%. We are near 75%. That target is $200 to $800 a day, which on a $60,000 asset is almost nothing. It would be brutally boring. That is exactly the point.

The watchlist

• Resistance — $66,000 to $67,000 — Still rejecting. No break yet.

• The 50% — $71,000 — Above the current range, and the level that matters if a rally develops.

• Monthly swing top — $82,000 — No break above a monthly swing high yet. That break is the Gann confirmation.

• Daily range — $200 to $800 — Down 75% from the high; the low zone needs 85% to 95%.

• Weekly range — $2,500 to $3,500 — Currently $5,400, down 46%. Needs 65% to 75%.

• Monthly range — $10,000 to $12,000 — Down 14% and already inside the 12% to 18% band.

Nobody is watching

The interest data is bleak in every direction. New weekly YouTube views across ten of the larger crypto channels are down, and so are new subscribers. Spot crypto ETF volume is down, along with market share and cumulative spot volumes.

Exchange volume has hit fresh lows around $15 billion. The number worth holding onto is $10 billion, because that was last cycle’s low — if we go through it, there is less money here in accumulation than there was last time.

Search interest has made new lows on the 30-day, 90-day and twelve-month windows, and on the five-year it has hit 22, taking out the 2024 lows and testing 2023. Below 21 and you are looking at the lowest readings in six or seven years.

More exchanges are closing too. That is normal in a bear market — they live on fees and only the strong ones survive — but it is worth thinking about where your coins are actually held while it happens.

Source: The Block, updated 16 August 2026

Stocks are fine. Bitcoin is not.

The S&P and the Dow have both made new all-time highs and the NASDAQ has cleared significant resistance. Bitcoin, in the same week, printed its second-lowest close of the cycle.

That split is normal for midterm years. Bitcoin has a rough time while the S&P grinds higher, right up until the end. In 2018 the S&P kept making new highs and then they both crashed together into December, with a Christmas rally as the consolation.

Whatever correlation people were drawing between Bitcoin and tech stocks does not show up when money gets tighter.

Run the cycle overlays yourself →

The Fed is behind the market

The Fed is holding, and the probabilities have drifted back toward holds into early 2027 — perhaps one hike in December and little else.

The bond market disagrees. The 30-year has been at fresh highs, the highest in about 19 years, back at levels last seen around 2007. The 10-year has run to fresh highs of its own and the 2-year tested 4.3% before the recent pullback.

That gap matters because of how it has resolved before. The market signals higher rates, the Fed holds for months, and then has to catch up quickly. That is what happened through 2016 to 2018, into the 2006 real estate top, and into 2000 — hold too long, then hike fast, and the pressure lands on the market.

If that plays out into 2027 and Bitcoin has not already done its accumulation and its run toward $150,000 or $200,000, the timing gets difficult.

One thing holding up

Sentiment is the mild positive. Fear and greed is at 31 and holding in fear rather than collapsing, even as price slides.

Last cycle it put in its low in extreme fear, rallied, made a higher low still in extreme fear, and only touched greed after price broke the 200-day. So the sentiment low tends to come first and the confirmation later. Expect at least one more visit to extreme fear, which would line up with the volatility targets.

The Gann swing says the same. On the monthly there has been no break above a swing high — just swing top after swing top, exactly as in 2018 and 2014. That swing top now sits near $82,000, with resistance at $66,000 and the 50% at $71,000. Plenty to do.

Volatility always tops after the all-time high, and always bottoms after the low.

The bottom line

We are at week 45 with the second-lowest close behind us, which is precisely where the last three bear markets sat before a minor rally, a contraction, and one final dump.

Watch the ranges rather than the price. Daily toward $200 to $800, weekly toward $2,500 to $3,500, monthly toward $10,000 to $12,000. When they get there, the low is close.

Then wait for the 200-day break and the first higher high above it. That is the confirmation, and it has never arrived any other way.

It is boring, and it is meant to be. That is what the end of a bear market feels like.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — Bitcoin: It’s Grinding To The Bitter End (22:59)

PS. Gold, the stock markets at new all-time highs, and the real estate cycle are all coming up in the next updates.

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We are not licensed financial advisors. All content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investing involves risk — always do your own research and due diligence. Information is accurate at time of writing but may change without notice. Read our full disclaimer here.

Gold and sugar have risen 13% and 16% in a matter of weeks. Park that for a moment, because it is the end of this story rather than the start.

The subject is housing across the US, UK and Australia — three countries, three governments, three tax systems. And one identical outcome.

Three markets, one problem

Divide the median house price by the median income and all three charts point the same way, at much the same angle. Australia runs near 8 to 1, the UK about the same, the US a little lower at 5.5 to 1.

Every one of those ratios has roughly doubled in a generation. This is now the largest economic problem in all three countries, and it arrived in all three at once.

That synchronisation is the clue. Three different political systems do not produce the same result by coincidence. Something common sits underneath them, and it is credit.

Source: OECD analytical house price indicators

Two engines that never run at the same speed

Wages rise through productivity — better technology, better equipment, better training, and businesses willing to fund all of it. That is slow, difficult work, and productivity growth across the developed world has been weak for years.

A house needs none of that. It does not have to get 10% bigger or 10% better to be worth 10% more. The price can rise because rates fell, or banks lent more, or more people moved in, or fewer homes got built.

So one side appreciates through credit and scarcity, the other through productivity. Put those two in a race over thirty years and there is only ever one outcome.

Anything that increases what a buyer can borrow gets absorbed into what a seller can charge.

Which is why the help never helps

Australian mortgage rates once hit 17% to 18%, then fell for most of three decades into the pandemic. When your rate halves, your repayment should halve too. That is not what happened. Buyers borrowed more instead, so the repayment stayed put and only the debt grew.

The second income did the same thing. Households went from one earner to two, which was meant to make life easier — and the market simply repriced around it until two incomes became the entry requirement rather than an advantage.

Construction costs are the one people get wrong. Materials, labour and compliance have genuinely become dearer, but that is not where the long-run rise sits. The building itself depreciates as it ages. The land does not, and you cannot manufacture more well-located land.

The wealth that was never created

There is an illusion worth naming. When house prices double, the country is not richer. It is the same house. Nothing was produced. All that changed is the name on the title and what the next person had to pay.

So rising prices are a transfer between generations rather than new wealth. If you own one home and live in it, you have not gained — selling means buying back into the same market, or renting in one that has risen with it. The genuine winners are those holding several properties, or who bought before the repricing.

Now think about it politically. In all three countries, owners outnumber renters at the ballot box, so no government wins an election by bringing house prices down. That leaves exactly one lever: help people in. Grants, guarantees, schemes.

Every one of them feeds the demand side and none of them touches supply, which means every one of them capitalises straight back into the land price.

Where this is turning

Prices have now stalled worldwide. In some countries that happened years ago; in others growth has been minimal or is quietly losing to inflation. Australia ran a little longer than the US and UK, which is what the bigger cycle usually does, and has since come down too.

Different rhythm, same direction — and it looks like the end of a credit cycle.

Which brings us back to gold and sugar. When the credit cycle turns, necessities come front and centre: food, energy, precious metals. That shift began late last year and is still running, because it is a big, slow process.

Necessity markets rising while property stalls and falls is not two unrelated stories. It is one cycle, turning on time.

The bottom line

House prices did not rise because houses got better. They rose because borrowing capacity did, and because the land underneath them cannot be manufactured.

That is why twenty years of affordability policy across three countries has widened the gap rather than closed it, and why the next round will do the same.

What changes the picture is not policy. It is the credit cycle turning — and the assets that move first when it does are already moving.

— Michael

Watch the full breakdown — The Credit (Engineered) Rise of Bullsh*t House Prices (8:47)

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Bitcoin has done essentially nothing this week — a lower high and a lower low, with the ranges tightening exactly as we have been tracking.

So rather than another week of the same, here is the work on where this cycle low actually lands. Three different measures, run separately, and they all point at roughly the same price.

Measure the dumps in dollars, not percent

This is the part most people skip. Look at each major sell-off in dollar terms rather than percentages, because that is what tells you where the next one ends.

The breakdown through $100,000 was the trigger for this bear market, with the double top near $116,000 as the earlier warning. From the top, the first major dump ran about $46,000. The next was $38,000. The one after that — the loud one, where everyone called the low and got caught — was $25,000.

Each dump is smaller than the last. And notice the rhythm: the drops have been quick this cycle while the counter-trend rallies have taken far longer, which is precisely what keeps convincing people the bottom is in.

Every prior cycle did the same thing. In 2022 it went $36,000, then $31,000, then around $7,000 to $10,000. In 2018, $14,000, then $6,000, then $5,400, then roughly $3,500. In 2014 it was $800 to $900, then $400 to $500, then $300. The last move into the low is almost always the smallest one.

Which puts the next one above $42,000

So apply the most recent dump to where we are. Take $25,000 off the July top and you land at about $42,000. Measured properly it is $24,903, which lands at $42,032.

That is not an extreme number. It sits comfortably above the bearish calls of $30,000 or $20,000 that keep circulating.

And here is the useful part. If Bitcoin broke below $42,000 from here, that would be the first time in its history that the final correction into a low was larger than the one before it. Possible, but it has never happened. So the odds favour the low sitting above that.

The 300-week has caught every cycle low

Second measure. Every price cycle has reached either the 200-week or the 300-week moving average at its low.

Last cycle price broke to the 200-week, sat around it, failed, tried again, failed, then hit the 300-week and hugged it before breaking out. The confirmations came later, above $18,000 and then above $23,000. The cycle before that hugged the 200-week and took off. The pandemic drop hit the 300-week and recovered almost immediately.

Right now price is $63,500 and the 300-week sits at $55,500, climbing steadily. By the time we get there it is probably nearer $56,000.

From the recent turning point down to that line is roughly $11,000.

And the weekly ranges agree

Third measure, and this is the one that ties it together. In every prior cycle, the final move into the low has been about the same size as the largest weekly declines seen during that bear market.

This bear market’s biggest weekly bars have run $19,000 to $21,000 in total range, with open-to-close moves around $10,000 to $13,500. So an $11,000 move into the low is entirely ordinary — smaller than the worst weeks we have already had.

The same held in 2022, where the moves into the low ran $5,500 to $8,000 against much larger bars earlier. In 2018 it was $3,000 to $3,500. In 2014, about $300.

Volatility contracts into the low. That is the whole point, and it is why all three measures converge instead of contradicting each other.

Where this lands

• Price now — $63,500 — A lower high and a lower low on the week, with ranges tightening.

• The 300-week — $55,500 — Rising toward $56,000. Every cycle low has reached the 200- or 300-week.

• The dump floor — $42,032 — If the next drop matches the last at $24,903. Below it would be a first in Bitcoin’s history.

• The drawdown — about 12% — From here to the 300-week. Roughly 17% to 18% from the top.

• Daily ATR — $1,300 now — Watching for $600 to $800, which has marked the zone in prior cycles.

The timing points at Q4

The calendar has been repeating too. This cycle has printed lows in November, February and June, which is the same rinse-and-repeat rhythm as before.

In 2018 there were lows in February and June, then a crash in November into the significant low, with the actual cycle low landing in December. The damage was done in November and price held there. 2014 ran February, April, a June turning point, then September and October before the low arrived in January.

Put together, that points at late Q3 into early Q4.

What actually confirms it

One rule matters more than the rest here, and it has never been broken.

Bitcoin has never formed higher highs while below the 200-day moving average. Through every bear market it is lower high after lower high, month after month, until the 200-day finally breaks — and only then does a higher high appear and start taking out the prior tops.

2018 did it. 2014 did it, roughly twelve months after the breakdown, when the accumulation finally ended. Watching for that break is worth more than any number of attempts to call the exact tick.

We have never seen higher highs form underneath the 200-day.

Why the next run may be smaller

Here is the part I keep saying and will keep saying. Every blow-off top in Bitcoin’s history was preceded by roughly 18 to 24 months of accumulation and reaccumulation — coins coming off the table before the move.

2022 into 2023 before the 2024 run. 2019 into 2020. A year of accumulation in 2015 plus nearly another of reaccumulation. Two years below $30 across 2011 and 2012.

I do not think there is enough time left in the 18-year cycle for that to happen again before this decade is out. Which means a new all-time high is still possible, but a blow-off on the scale of 2013, 2017 or 2021 looks unlikely.

Nobody is looking

Search interest has just made fresh lows — 24 for Bitcoin and 14 for crypto. You have to go back to 2023 to find the same reading, and it is printing new lows across the five-year, twelve-month, ninety-day and thirty-day windows all at once.

Exchange volume has hit a new low too, around $15 billion.

Meanwhile CPI, core CPI, PPI and core PPI all came in on or better than forecast this week, the S&P and NASDAQ did well, and Bitcoin went sideways. The money is still far more interested in the AI story than the blockchain one, and no amount of reframing changes what the raw data says.

Source: Google Trends, worldwide, week of 2–8 August 2026

The bottom line

Three independent measures — shrinking dumps, the 300-week average, and the size of the largest weekly declines — all land between $55,000 and $56,000, with $42,000 as the floor if the pattern breaks.

That is about 12% below here, and 17% to 18% from the top. If you are buying through it, the only question that matters is whether you can sit through that without selling.

Timing points at late Q3 into early Q4. Confirmation comes when the 200-day breaks and a higher high forms above it, not before.

I genuinely hope I am wrong about the size of what follows. But I would rather look at the raw data now than find out later.

— Jason

Watch the full breakdown — Bitcoin: Countdown To The Brutal Bottom (29:42)

PS. This week’s free reports have gone out — check your inbox, or subscribe to get next week’s. There is also a deeper dive on the average true range coming in the next video, looking at exactly where the daily, weekly and monthly ranges need to sit before the low is in.

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TIA Market Notes · YouTube · X

We are not licensed financial advisors. All content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investing involves risk — always do your own research and due diligence. Information is accurate at time of writing but may change without notice. Read our full disclaimer here.