Does the death cross mark the start of a bear market?
The 50-day average crossing below the 200-day average marks the start of a bear phase.
Where we are now. Today the 50-day average is $81,105 and the 200-day is $72,129, so the 50-day is above — a death cross would need the 50-day to fall through it. Shaded bands are the 12 occasions the rule fired, the same ones counted in the table below: 2011-09, 2014-04, 2014-09, 2015-09, 2018-04, 2019-10, 2020-03, 2021-06, 2022-01, 2023-09, 2024-08, 2025-04.
This rule has fired 12 times. A 40% fall followed within a year on 7 of the 12. On comparable days when it did not fire, a 40% fall followed 29.1% of the time.
| Times it fired | 12 | separate occasions, not days |
|---|---|---|
| Still open | 1 | fired since 2025-11-17; the 365-day window has not closed, so these are excluded from the figures above rather than counted as a success or a failure |
| What followed | 58.3% | a 40% fall within 365 days of that close |
| Could plausibly be | 36% to 78% | the range the true rate could take, on this many occasions, before you invoke anything but chance; a binomial interval that treats the episodes as independent trials |
| Happened anyway | 29.1% | comparable days when the rule did not fire |
| Difference | +29.2 pts | near zero means the signal added nothing |
Where the claim comes from
The mirror of the golden cross, and treated with more alarm than it has earned.
How we tested it
Trigger: 50DMA crosses below 200DMA. Scored as a top rule: 40% fall within 365 days.
Only days the rule could have fired are counted. Consecutive triggers within 90 days are one occasion. The baseline excludes each trigger and the 90 days after it, because the aftermath of a signal is not a fair comparison. No verdict is given below 20 occasions.
What the numbers say
Twelve occasions. 58.3% followed by a 40% fall within a year, against 29.1% on comparable days when the rule did not fire: a 29.2-point gap, positive, on 12 observations. The second-largest gap on the scorecard, on twelve observations; the interval does not clear the baseline.
What this does not mean
A large gap on a thin sample is exactly the pattern that produces confident nonsense. We report it and decline to call it.
And it does not mean the threshold itself was chosen fairly. Every rule in this registry was specified by someone who had already seen bitcoin’s history, so the cut-off is fitted to the record it is being judged against. The interval above measures sampling variation between independent trials and nothing else: not the choice of threshold, not that cycle turns are few and related, and not that thirty-six rules were tested in total. Only the forward record, which fixes a rule before its answer is known, avoids this.
What would change the answer
Eight more crossings.
If you cannot time it, the question changes
Most of the claims in this registry cannot be shown to beat a coin flip, and several are worse than one. That is not an argument against holding bitcoin. It is an argument that the decision worth spending effort on is how much to hold, not when to buy.
That is what How much bitcoin? is for: what fixed weights actually did in a conventional portfolio, and how much the answer depended on the year you started. For the valuation state today, and what has historically followed readings like it, see Where Things Stand.
Recomputed from the daily public snapshot by fetch/scorecard.py and published as scorecard.json. Method on the methods page; every claim in the scorecard.