Monthly closes since 2014 with the long-run trend removed, and one sine wave fitted to what is left. The simplest possible cycle model, read literally: how far through the wave is the price right now?
Each dot is a month-end close, shown as the distance above or below Bitcoin's long-run trend. The blue line is the one sine that fits those dots best. Dashed is where the same wave goes next. Hover or tap for the reading in any month.
The same wave drawn once, trough to trough. Zero is the bottom, fifty is the top.
Every month, the fit was redone using only the data available then, and asked the same question. The grey line is the answer at the time; the blue line is what the final fit now assigns to that month. Where they separate, the reading was later revised.
The chart above only shows that the reading rarely changed afterwards. This is the harder test. At every month since January 2019 the wave was fitted on the data available then, and its call was compared with what the price went on to do.
| Call made each month | Right | Best constant guess | Months tested |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price will beat or lag its trend over the next 12 months, in the wave's direction | 80% | 54% | 82 |
| The same call, 6 months ahead | 61% | 57% | 88 |
| Turning point | Forecast made | Wave said | Miss |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peak, Mar 2021 (+255% vs trend) | Mar 2020 | Jun 2021 | 3 months late |
| Trough, Dec 2022 (−54% vs trend) | Dec 2021 | Aug 2023 | 8 months late |
| Peak, Nov 2024 (+29% vs trend) | Nov 2023 | Jan 2025 | 2 months late |
| Month | Close | What the wave said at the time |
|---|---|---|
| Nov 2021, the first nominal peak | $57,005 | 53% through the cycle, at the peak |
| Dec 2022, the bottom | $16,547 | 94% through the cycle, at the trough |
| Jul 2025, the latest peak by month-end close | $115,758 | 58% through the cycle, at the peak |
Those 82 months are not 82 independent bets. With a 42-month wave, 2019 to 2026 holds about two cycles, so the hit rate comes from being right through roughly one rise and one fall. The wave has also been late at every turning point so far, which is tolerable at a bottom and expensive at a top.
The answer depends on two choices: how the trend is removed, and whether the period is free or pinned to the four-year halving.
| Model | Period | Position now | Reading | Share of residual explained |
|---|
Three completed cycles is a thin record to fit a period to, and the wave has placed earlier turning points several months from where they actually fell. Read the position as a rough bearing. The halving schedule, liquidity and leverage drive the price; the sine only summarises what they have done so far.
Daily BTC-USD closes from Yahoo Finance, taken at each month end. The trend is a power law in Bitcoin's age: log price regressed on the log of days since the genesis block on 3 January 2009. One sine was fitted jointly with that trend by least squares, trying every period from 24 to 84 months in quarter-month steps and keeping the best. Position is measured from the wave's trough, so 0% is the bottom, 25% halfway up, 50% the top, 75% halfway down. The vintage chart repeats the whole procedure on each month's data alone.