Crypto Super Hub

Fakeout fears are back. I’m still buying.

Jake Pahor — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 09:03:31 GMT

Fear’s back.

On Saturday Arthur Hayes posted that he’d “dumped it all”, his family office’s whole trading book, because things look “a bit dicey out there in macro and geopolitical land”. It caused carnage on crypto Twitter. Hours later Bitcoin dipped under US$80,000, and more than US$400 million of leveraged bets were wiped out in four hours.

Now people are asking: was the whole rally a fakeout? Is the bear market not over yet?

Here’s my take. Arthur Hayes plays a totally different game to 99.9% of us. Short-term trading is a quick way to go broke, especially when you’re trading off someone else’s calls.

I can’t tell you if Bitcoin will be lower next week. I measure success in years, not weeks. So I checked our score history for what came next after weeks like this.

The short version: every day the CSH Score sat where it is now, Bitcoin was higher two years later. This cycle looks a lot like the last three. And one level would change my mind.

Want a plan that buys through weeks like this without you deciding each time? You can try every feature in the CSH app free for two weeks.

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CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score: 32.4 this morning, down 0.7 on last Sunday
Bitcoin: about US$80,800, down about 1% on last Sunday
May high: about US$83,000, and Bitcoin is just under it
50-week moving average: about US$76,100
Bull market support band: about US$72,400 to US$76,600

The CSH Score rates where Bitcoin’s price sits in its own history, from 0 to 100. At 32 it’s in the bottom third.

My plan bought again last Monday at a CSH Score of 33.3, and buys again tomorrow. I’ve stacked a few buys between 30 and 35 now, so my dry powder stays parked unless the Score drops under 30.

What our data says about a Score in the low 30s

Since 2012, the CSH Score has sat between 30 and 35 on 214 days that have two full years of history after them.

Two years later, Bitcoin was higher on all 214. The median gain was 191%. The smallest was 47%, from 25 October 2020, six years ago today.

One year later, it was higher on 89% of them. Every miss came in late 2014, in the middle of that bear market. The worst was down 39%.

Nearly half those days came in 2020. The rest are spread over eight other years, from 2013 to 2024.

One warning. Every past CSH Score is worked out with today’s model, after the fact. So this is what happened, with hindsight. It isn’t a promise about the next two years.

Where this cycle sits

From the October 2025 top, Bitcoin fell 53% in 267 days, to about US$58,500 on 1 July. The last three bear markets fell 77% to 85% and took 12 to 13 months. This one was shallower and shorter.

116 days on from that low, Bitcoin is up 38%. At the same point after the last three lows, it was up 37% (2015), 67% (2019) and 42% (2023). Each time, the biggest gains came later.

One difference: the CSH Score is higher now (32.4, against 6.0, 28.4 and 17.6 back then), because this bear didn’t fall as far.

Nobody knows for sure where we are in a cycle while we’re in it. But on the long timeframes I think the structure is still very bullish, and the odds still sit with us being early in a bull market.

The level that would change my mind

A weekly close under the 50-week moving average, about US$76,000. That’s not a good sign, and it could mean this plays out like 2019.

In May 2019, Bitcoin closed back above its 50-week MA and ran to about US$12,900 by late June. In December it closed a week back under it. Then COVID hit, and by March 2020 Bitcoin was down 61% at about US$4,960.

Fast forward to April 2021, and it was about US$63,000, up almost 1,200% from that low.

If that happens again, my plan doesn’t change. It buys every week while the CSH Score is under 45, with bigger orders the lower it goes.

Jake’s Workbench: October in my plan, and a milestone

My plan has bought three times in October (the 5th, 12th and 19th), with the CSH Score at 37.1, 34.0 and 33.3. Tomorrow makes it four. Over the month, Bitcoin has gone from about US$83,600 to US$80,800.

And a milestone: this week one of our founding members made the first payment. Tom and I have worked on Crypto Super Hub for eight months, since it was an idea we kicked around on our walks. It’s not much, but seeing someone pay for something you built is a feeling I won’t forget. The first 100 members lock in A$19 a month for life. After that it’s A$29.

Our iPhone and Android apps are also with Apple and Google for review. They go live once approved.

Quick Hits

Week to Fri 23 Oct: spot Bitcoin ETFs took in a net US$301 million, even after US$636 million went out on Thursday alone.
Sat 24 Oct: US$404 million of leveraged long bets were liquidated in four hours as Bitcoin dipped under US$80,000.
Sat 24 Oct: Arthur Hayes’s family office, Maelstrom, sold about US$22 million of ETH, ENA, UNI and other coins (Lookonchain’s count).
Oil: Brent crude hit about US$114 a barrel, its highest since May.
Treasury: its draft law would have exchanges report Australians’ crypto trades to the ATO every quarter from 1 July 2027. Feedback closes Wednesday.

Week Ahead

Mon 26 Oct, 10am: Bitcoin’s weekly close. The 50-week MA is about US$76,100.
Wed 28 Oct: Australian inflation for the September quarter, and Treasury’s crypto reporting consultation closes.
Thu 29 Oct, 4am: US Fed rate decision. Most economists expect rates to stay at 3.75% to 4.00%.
Thu 29 Oct, late evening: the ECB’s rate decision, then US GDP and PCE inflation.
Fri 30 Oct: Bank of Japan decision. At 6pm, the monthly Bitcoin options expiry on Deribit.
Sat 31 Oct: first annual return due for SMSFs set up last financial year, the Mt Gox repayment deadline, and CSH’s pre-launch trials end at midnight.

The Close

Nobody knows where Bitcoin will be next week, and I don’t try to guess. I care about where it’ll be in a few years. I strongly believe it’ll be a lot higher, and our history backs that up.

So when the timeline panics because someone famous sold, I check my plan. Last Monday it bought, and tomorrow it buys again.

If you joined before our Score upgrade, your trial ends at midnight Saturday. Add a card before then to keep your plans running. If you don’t, they stay in your account, read-only.

What would make you change your plan? Hit reply with 1, 2 or 3:

A weekly close under the 50-week MA
A CSH Score under 20
Nothing, I’m in this for years

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Crypto Super Hub is general information and education only. Nothing here is financial advice, and it doesn’t take your objectives, financial situation or needs into account. Crypto is volatile and you can lose money. Past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed financial adviser before making investment decisions. We hold Bitcoin ourselves, so assume we’re biased.

Forget Uptober. Get ready for Choptober.

Jake Pahor — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 08:43:33 GMT

October is meant to be Uptober.

Bitcoin had just run 48% off its July low and closed a week back above its 50-week moving average. Then it stalled. It closed at about US$86,600 on 22 September, and four weeks later it’s lower. This week it briefly dipped under US$80,000 and slipped back under the May high, around US$83,000.

My read for the next few months isn’t Uptober. It’s Choptober.

That’s not a bearish call. In a bull market, Bitcoin spends more time going sideways than going up, and I went back through our score history to see how much more. The answer’s below, along with why I think this stretch is the best part of a bull market to be buying.

If you want a plan that keeps buying through the chop without you deciding each week, you can try every feature in the CSH app free for two weeks.

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CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score: 33.1 this morning, down 2.1 on last Sunday
Bitcoin: about US$81,500, down 2.4% on last Sunday
May high: about US$83,000, and Bitcoin is just under it
50-week moving average: about US$76,500, and falling
Bull market support band: about US$71,500 to US$76,200
Price at a CSH Score of 30: about US$79,400 (the app’s price map, 18 October)

The CSH Score rates where Bitcoin’s price sits in its own history, from 0 to 100. At 33 it’s still in the bottom third.

My plan kept buying this week with the CSH Score between 30 and 35. Under 30 the orders get bigger, and that’s the level I’m hoping we get to.

What a bull market pause looks like

Pull up a chart of the last few bull markets and you’ll see the same shape. A big, fast move up. Then months of going sideways and down while the market consolidates. Then the next big move up.

To test it, I found the week in each bull market when Bitcoin first closed back above its 50-week moving average after the bear. This cycle, that was 20 September. Here’s what came next each time.

2015 to 2016. Bitcoin closed back above the 50-week MA in October 2015 and ran to about US$465 by mid-December. Then it went sideways for four months, falling as much as 21% (to about US$366 in February). It never closed a week under the 50-week MA, and the CSH Score stayed between 9 and 18 the whole time. When it broke out, Bitcoin got to US$767 by June 2016.

2023. This is the one I keep coming back to. Bitcoin closed back above the 50-week MA in March 2023 and ran to about US$30,500 by mid-April. Then it went sideways for six months, down as much as 18% (about US$25,100 in June). It never closed a week under the 50-week MA, and the CSH Score stayed between 15 and 31. It broke out in late October, and by March 2024 Bitcoin was at US$73,000.

2019 to 2020, the warning. Bitcoin closed back above the 50-week MA in May 2019 and ran to about US$12,900 by late June. That pause lasted 16 months and included the COVID crash. At the worst of it, in March 2020, Bitcoin was down 61% at about US$4,960, and it closed 11 weeks under the 50-week MA along the way. The next leg still came, to US$63,000 by April 2021. It just felt nothing like a pause in March 2020.

Zoom out to each whole bull market, from the bear market low to the top, and it’s the same story. In each of the last three, Bitcoin spent at least half its days stuck under an earlier high, in stretches of two months or more: 50% of the 2015 to 2017 bull market, 70% of 2018 to 2021, and 53% of 2022 to 2025. The moves up happen fast. Most of a bull market is spent waiting for the next one.

This pause is four weeks old. Bitcoin is down 6% from its 22 September close, the CSH Score has stayed between 33 and 38, and Bitcoin is still above both the 50-week MA and the bull market support band (the 20-week and 21-week moving averages traders watch in a bull market).

Why I’d rather buy the chop

In the 2015 to 2016 and 2023 pauses, the CSH Score never went above 31. A plan that buys under a Score of 45 bought every single week of both.

In 2023 that’s 28 weeks of buys at an average of about US$27,900. Less than five months after the pause ended, Bitcoin was at US$73,000.

None of it felt good at the time. By June 2023 Bitcoin was down 18% from the April high, and every buy since mid-April was underwater. If you sold then, you sold at around US$25,000 and watched it get to US$73,000 by March 2024. And at the COVID low in 2020, it would have felt like the bull market was over.

These are past cycles, read with today’s model of the CSH Score. They show what pauses have looked like, not how long this one will last.

Two paths from here:

Bitcoin holds above its 50-week MA, about US$76,500, and goes sideways between there and the September high for a few months. That’s 2016 and 2023.
Bitcoin closes a week under the 50-week MA and the support band and keeps falling. That’s closer to 2019.

My plan does the same thing on both paths. It buys while the CSH Score is under 45, and the lower the Score goes, the bigger the orders.

What’s weighing on it

Most of what’s dragging on Bitcoin right now isn’t crypto news.

US inflation came in hot on 14 October: 3.7% for September, against 3.6% expected. The US 10-year Treasury yield briefly went above 5.3%, and markets jumped to about even odds of another Fed rate rise at the 27 to 28 October meeting, before those odds fell back under 20% by Friday. Oil is part of why inflation won’t settle. US crude closed the week at about US$101 a barrel on Middle East supply worries, and higher oil feeds straight into prices. Then the AI trade cracked. CoreWeave fell about 25% in five sessions as investors questioned whether AI infrastructure companies can repay what they’ve borrowed, and the Nasdaq 100 fell 5.5% for the week.

Three charts I’m watching, all weekly, from my TradingView this morning.

The Nasdaq 100 closed at 29,188, just under its bull market support band (29,261 to 29,541). Its 50-week MA is about 6.5% lower, at 27,299. A weekly close back above the band keeps its uptrend intact. Losing the band puts the 50-week MA in play. Bitcoin fell with tech stocks this week, so this is the chart I’d watch first.

Bitcoin’s share of the whole crypto market rose to 60.6%, above its 50-week MA and support band (all three sit between 59.3% and 59.6%). It’s spent more than a year mostly between 58% and 61%.

And the flip side: altcoins against Bitcoin. Add up the value of every coin except Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT, price it in Bitcoin, and you can see whether alts are gaining on Bitcoin or falling behind. That ratio fell 4% this week to 0.36 and closed under its 50-week MA and support band. Ether measured in Bitcoin did the same, down 2.6% to 0.0295. In the last two cycles, alts kept losing ground to Bitcoin until that ratio got down to around 0.25, in late 2019 and again at the end of 2020. This cycle it never got there. It’s been mostly between 0.33 and 0.40 since August 2025, and this week it’s slipping.

Put the three together and money inside crypto is moving towards Bitcoin while the Nasdaq wobbles. I only buy Bitcoin for now, so none of this changes my plan. I’d consider alts at the right opportunity, and this is the chart I’m watching for it.

Jake’s Workbench: the cash I haven’t put in yet

I still have cash to deploy. I’m not putting it all in at US$81,000, and I’m not sitting on it waiting for a crash either.

My plan decides. It buys every week while the CSH Score is under 45 and puts more in under 30. If we get a dip under 30, it buys more without me having to talk myself into it. If we don’t, I’ll still have bought through the chop.

Quick Hits

14 Oct: US inflation 3.7% for September, 0.1 above forecasts. The 10-year yield briefly topped 5.3%.
16 Oct: CoreWeave fell 12% on the day and about 25% over five sessions, with its bonds yielding above 15%.
Week to 16 Oct: spot Bitcoin ETFs had net outflows on three of the four days reported, the biggest about US$261 million on 14 Oct.
Oil: US crude closed the week at about US$101 a barrel, Brent about US$110.
Nasdaq 100: down 5.5% for the week.

Week Ahead

Mon 19 Oct, 10am: Bitcoin’s weekly close. Finishing the week back above the May high, about US$83,000, would be a good start.
Mon 19 Oct: China’s September-quarter GDP.
Thu 22 Oct, morning our time: chipmakers Lam Research and Texas Instruments report, after this week’s chip sell-off.
Wed 28 Oct: Australian inflation for the September quarter.
Thu 29 Oct, 4am: US Fed rate decision.
Fri 30 Oct, 6pm: monthly Bitcoin options expiry on Deribit, about US$11 billion.
Sat 31 Oct: first annual return due for SMSFs set up last financial year, and the Mt Gox repayment deadline.

The Close

Nobody knows if this pause lasts four weeks or six months. Two of the last three lasted four to six months. One lasted 16.

That’s why I don’t try to guess how long it lasts. I wrote down what my plan does in every week of it: buy while the CSH Score is under 45, and buy more under 30. So when Bitcoin has a red week, I’m not sitting there wondering whether this is the dip. My plan has already bought it.

Where are you at? Hit reply with 1, 2 or 3:

Buying through it
Waiting for a lower CSH Score
Haven’t got a plan yet

If you want your own plan doing this for you, you can try every feature in the CSH app free for two weeks.

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Bitcoin has to hold US$83k. Here’s my plan.

Jake Pahor — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 08:15:12 GMT

Three weeks ago I sent you an issue called “Is the Bitcoin bear over? Probably.” This week Bitcoin dropped as low as US$80,300 before bouncing back to around US$83,000, right on the high it set in May. Bulls and bears are fighting over that level, and it’s the one I’m watching most closely.

The short version: I still think the bear market ended in July. If I’m right, the May high should hold on a weekly close. If it doesn’t, that’s the first warning. A weekly close under the 50-week moving average, about US$77,100, would change my mind. My plan buys while the CSH Score is under 45, and buys more the further Bitcoin falls. Whichever way this goes, I have a plan for it, and I think you should too.

This is the first of a new monthly issue. Each month I’ll cover what happened, why, the paths from here and what my plan does on each. Then I’ll score my own calls the month after, whichever way they land.

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September in numbers

Bitcoin closed September at US$83,563, up 6.4% and its best monthly close of 2026 (Bitstamp).
In Australian dollars it was up 9.3%, because the Aussie dollar fell against the US dollar.
On 20 September it closed a week above its 50-week moving average for the first time in 44 weeks.
The next day it broke the May high of US$82,833 and got to US$87,374.
US spot Bitcoin ETFs took in US$2.65 billion, after US$3.52 billion in August (SoSoValue).
The CSH Score finished August at 31.0 and September at 36.4.

What the reading changes: my buy plan buys anywhere under a CSH Score of 45, and the Score hasn’t been above 45 since January. At midday on Sunday the CSH Score was 35.0, with Bitcoin around US$82,900 (about A$119,000), so the plan is still buying. This week it bought a smaller amount with the Score in the 35 to 40 band. Its bigger buys sit in the 30 to 35 band, about US$79,100 to US$83,300 on Sunday, and I’m hoping for a pullback into that band this week. It would take a rise to about US$92,300 for the Score to reach 45 and the buying to stop.

What happened

On paper, September should have been a bad month for Bitcoin.

Oil jumped back above US$100 a barrel after fighting flared up again around the Strait of Hormuz at the start of September. Higher oil means higher inflation, and central banks kept raising rates to fight it. The US Federal Reserve hiked on 16 September, its first rise since 2023. Five other central banks raised in September too, including the RBA on the 29th, which took our cash rate to 4.60%. The US 10-year bond yield finished the month at 5.29%, its highest since 2002.

That matters because when a US government bond pays you over 5%, an asset that pays nothing, like Bitcoin, is a harder sell.

Bitcoin went up anyway. The one wobble came on 15 September, when a US Senate vote on the CLARITY Act, the big crypto market bill, failed by one vote. Bitcoin dipped just under US$75,000, and about US$571 million of bets made with borrowed money were wiped out (CoinGlass). Three days later it was back above US$80,000.

On the 20th it closed a week above its 50-week moving average. That’s Bitcoin’s average weekly closing price over roughly the last year. Weekly closes back above it have confirmed every Bitcoin bull market since 2015, usually a few months after the bottom. It has given false signals too, most famously in March 2022.

On the 21st it broke the May high, and ETF money followed: US$3.1 billion over the next nine trading days, including US$999 million on 21 September alone, the biggest day since October 2025 (SoSoValue, Farside).

I’ll be honest, I didn’t see it coming. A month ago I was expecting a downturn into Q4 and a few more chances to buy lower. I got complacent, and I wasn’t fully deployed. There’s nothing worse than watching Bitcoin rip while you’ve still got cash on the sidelines.

It wasn’t the first time this year either. In June and July, with Bitcoin between about US$58,000 and US$74,000, my plan said buy and my market bias said wait for lower. If I’d just followed the plan, I’d probably be close to fully deployed at much lower prices. Keep it simple, stupid, and stop trying to get too cute.

So I stopped fighting the market. At the end of September I raised the top of my buy range from 35 to 45, so my plan keeps buying at the start of a bull market instead of waiting for a dip that might never come. Now I’m sticking to it.

Why I think it happened

The bear market was short and shallow. For me, the euphoria this cycle peaked in January 2025, when the US president launched his own memecoin. By the October top it had mostly faded, and there was no FTX-style collapse to force one last crash. So the fall was smaller. If the 1 July low holds, this bear lasted 268 days and Bitcoin fell 54%. The three before it lasted 363 to 410 days and fell 77% to 87%.

ETF buyers came back. More than US$1 billion went into US spot Bitcoin ETFs in both August and September, straight after US$4.5 billion left in June. They kept buying through a month of rate hikes.

The trend reversed. In a downtrend, each high is lower than the last one and so is each low. Bitcoin made a higher low on 3 August, around US$62,200, then a higher high in September by breaking the May high. That’s what a trend reversal looks like. A smaller attempt failed between February and May. This one got past May’s top.

Why it’s slipped in October. The rally got crowded. By late September, people who’d bought in the previous five months were sitting on 33% unrealised profit, the most since December 2024 (CryptoQuant). When that many people are in profit, it doesn’t take much bad news for some of them to sell. October brought some: bond yields kept climbing, the Fed’s September minutes left the door open to another hike, and about US$390 million left the US spot ETFs in the first seven trading days (Farside, to 9 October). On 8 October alone, more than US$1 billion of bets on a rise made with borrowed money were wiped out (CoinGlass).

What our score history says

I went through every time since 2012 that Bitcoin has closed a week back above its 50-week moving average, and checked where the CSH Score was when it happened. It’s happened 11 times before this one, and the results split cleanly.

When the CSH Score was under 31, Bitcoin was higher a year later every time, 8 out of 8, by at least 55%.
When it was above 60, Bitcoin was lower a year later every time, 3 out of 3, by at least 39%. That includes March 2022, the false signal everyone remembers.
None came in between.

On 20 September the CSH Score was 32.2.

In plain English: the reclaims that worked came when Bitcoin was still low in its own history, after a long fall. The ones that failed came when it was already high. This one came low.

Two honest limits. Eleven is a small sample. And every reading in the Score’s history has been worked out after the fact with today’s model, so this is a look back with hindsight, not a promise about the next twelve months.

Where we are in the cycle

There are three common ways to time the end of a Bitcoin bear market.

Timing. Every past bear market bottomed 363 to 410 days after the top. This cycle, that window runs from 4 October to 20 November. If the July low holds, this bear ended about three months early. On 11 October Bitcoin was 44% above that low.
Seasonality. In US midterm election years, August and September have usually been weak. This year they were up 25% and 6.4%. The fourth quarter is the part still open. In 2018 and 2022, Bitcoin’s worst stretch came after the US 10-year yield peaked in October and November. That’s the best argument the bear case has left.
Valuation. Past bear markets bottomed below realised price, roughly the average price the whole market paid for its coins. That’s about US$53,700 (Newhedge, 6 October). This time Bitcoin never went below it.

Q4: three paths, one plan

The CSH Score rates where Bitcoin’s price sits in its own history, from 0 to 100. I run two plans on it. One buys anywhere under 45, with bigger orders the lower the Score goes. The other takes profit from 75. Between 45 and 75, neither plan does anything. On 11 October a Score of 45 was about US$92,300 and 75 was about US$125,600.

Path one: the May high holds and the rally keeps going. Weekly closes stay above US$82,800 and Bitcoin gets back above the September high. Once it’s past about US$92,000, the CSH Score goes over 45 and my buy plan stops. Taking profit doesn’t start until 75, which on 11 October was close to the 2025 all-time high. In the last three cycles, the Score took 20 to 25 months after the 50-week reclaim to get to 75. So on this path my plan mostly waits.

Path two: a pullback to the 50-week moving average, and it holds. The next level down is the 50-week moving average, about US$77,100 (Bitstamp, 11 October). It’s early in a bull market to be testing it, but it has been strong support in past bull markets. In 2015 to 2017 and 2023 to 2025, Bitcoin never had a weekly close below it once it had got back above it. In 2019 to 2021 it slipped under a few times, including during the COVID crash. On this path my plan keeps buying, and the orders get bigger as the CSH Score drops. Its larger buys start in the 30 to 35 band, about US$79,100 to US$83,300 on 11 October, and get bigger below that.

Path three: I’m wrong and the bear isn’t over. The warning sign is a weekly close under the May high. The real signal is a weekly close under the 50-week moving average. The case for this path is rates: they’re still rising, and the US 10-year hasn’t clearly peaked. A new low means Bitcoin falling under about US$57,700, the July low. On 11 October that was about where the CSH Score hits zero (about US$58,100), so that’s where my plan’s orders would be biggest.

If you’re sitting on cash waiting for a dip, I know the feeling. My plan doesn’t wait. It buys now because the Score is under 45, and buys more if the dip comes. What you do is your call. I’d rather make that decision now than halfway through a 20% drop.

What I’m watching

Mon 12 Oct, 10am AEST: the weekly close. Above US$82,800, the May high holds.
Wed 14 Oct, 10:30pm AEST: US inflation (CPI) for September. A hot number puts another Fed hike back on the table.
Wed 28 Oct, 10:30am AEST: Australian inflation for September, the main input for the RBA’s decision on 3 November.
Thu 29 Oct, 4am AEST: US Fed rate decision. Markets give a hike roughly a one-in-five chance (Investing.com Fed Rate Monitor, 10 October).
Sat 31 Oct: the Mt Gox repayment deadline, extended by a year last October. It’s also the tax return deadline if you lodge your own, which rolls to Monday 2 November because the 31st is a Saturday.
Tue 3 Nov: US midterm elections, and the RBA’s decision the same day.
Fri 20 Nov: the end of the window where every past cycle low landed. If July holds, this bear finished outside it, the first one to do that.

Three tests for November

I’ll score these in next month’s issue, whichever way they land.

No weekly close under the 50-week moving average before the US midterms on 3 November.
A weekly close above the January high of US$97,939.
US spot Bitcoin ETFs finish October with more money in than out.

Which path do you think we’re on? Hit reply with 1, 2 or 3. I’ll share how you voted in November’s issue.

The Close

Tom and I built the CSH Score and the plan builder so the decision gets made before the market moves, not in the middle of it.

You get the Score as it moves, updated every hour, a plan builder that turns it into orders at real prices, and a record of every buy and sell you make, stamped with the CSH Score at the hour you made it, so you can see whether you bought low and sold high.

If you’re new, it’s two weeks free, and nothing is charged until day 15. If you joined before the Score upgrade earlier this month, your trial runs to Saturday 31 October. The first 100 members lock in A$19 a month for as long as they stay. After that it’s A$29.

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The Score changed. So did my plan.

Jake Pahor — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 05:32:35 GMT

If you’ve opened the app since Saturday, your CSH Score looks different. That’s because Tom and I upgraded the model behind it.

It’s still one number from 0 to 100, and it still does one job: it shows where Bitcoin’s price sits between a floor and a ceiling built from its own history. What changed is how well it reads that history. Every past reading has been worked out again on the new model, so the whole chart is on one scale, and any plan you’ve saved now runs on the upgraded Score.

Changing the model a few days after we switched paid on isn’t great timing, and I’d rather tell you that straight. Sitting on a better one because the timing’s awkward would be worse. All models are wrong, but some are useful, and this upgrade makes ours a lot more useful.

So the first thing I did was run my own plan against it. Two of my numbers didn’t survive. Here’s what changed, and why.

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CSH Risk Dashboard

The CSH Score closed the week at 37.3 on the upgraded model, up from 37.1 last Sunday on the same model. Last week’s issue said 42.9: that was the old model.
Lower than on 51% of days since 2013.
Bitcoin: US$85,834 on Sunday in our history, about A$123,700. Up 1.7% on the week.
A third weekly close in a row above the 50-week moving average, which sits at about US$77,200 (Bitstamp weekly).
The bull market support band, the 20-week average and 21-week exponential average, is about US$71,200 to US$75,900.
My plan from this week: buys anywhere under a CSH Score of 45 and takes profit above 75.

What the reading changes: the plan bought last Monday, its first order since August, and it buys again this week because 37 is inside the range. A CSH Score above 45 pauses the buys. Above 75, it starts taking profit.

What the upgrade changed

Every Bitcoin cycle has grown less than the one before. From the low to the top, Bitcoin went up about 110 times in the 2015 to 2017 bull market, 21 times in the next one, and 8 times in the last. That’s diminishing returns, and the old model didn’t allow for it. So each cycle top read a little lower than the one before, and by October 2025 the top only read 75.5. High, but not high enough to flag the end of a bull market.

The upgraded model allows for diminishing returns. Every cycle top since 2013 now reads above 80, and every cycle low reads under 20. If the next cycle grows less again, the CSH Score should still read as high at the top as it did at the last ones.

It’s also steadier. The Score now only moves when Bitcoin’s price moves. On the old model there were 27 days when the Score shifted 5 points in a week while the price went nowhere. On the upgraded model there are none.

We don’t plan to change it often. The settings get reviewed when a cycle has clearly turned or at a planned checkpoint, never mid-cycle because the market feels different. If it does change, it goes on the About page with the date, and the whole chart gets worked out again.

One honest limit, same as always: the Score compares today’s price with Bitcoin’s own history. It isn’t a forecast, and it can’t tell you whether Bitcoin is a good investment. That part’s your call.

What it changed in my plan

Here’s what I was running before the change: a buy plan between a CSH Score of 20 and 45, and a sell plan taking profit above 80.

The floor at 20 had to go. On the old model, the last three cycle lows read about 20, so a range starting at 20 caught the bottom. On the upgraded model, those same lows read 18.1, 10.4 and 8.2. A plan that stops at 20 would now stop buying right when Bitcoin was lowest in its range. So my plan buys anywhere under 45, with bigger orders the lower the Score goes.

Why such a wide range? Because nobody knows where the bottom is, and people start at different points in the cycle. Take a new SMSF with cash ready to go today. The CSH Score is 37, three months after a low of 8.2. Waiting for it to get back under 20 could mean waiting a very long time. In the last three cycles, once the Score had climbed back to 37 after a low, it only went under 20 again once, on 32 days around the March 2020 COVID crash.

The low stretches also run a lot longer than the high ones. Since 2016 the CSH Score has spent 2,146 days under 45 and 486 days above 75. Bear markets and early bull markets drag on. Tops come and go quickly.

That’s why taking profit moves from 80 to 75. The 2025 top read 82.7. In that whole bull market the CSH Score spent 46 days above 80 and 203 days above 75. A rule that waits for 80 barely gets a chance to sell.

The top of the buy range stays at 45. Stopping at 40 did better over the full history because it kept more cash back for the bear markets, but from 2023 on, 45 did as well or slightly better. I’ve changed this plan twice in a month already, and I’m not changing it a third time for a small difference. I’ll look at it again when the Score first reaches 50.

To check all this, I ran three hypothetical investors through the upgraded history from January 2023, when I started buying in my SMSF. Each puts in A$500 a week, A$98,500 so far.

One buys every week and never sells (HODL): 1.27 Bitcoin today, about A$158,800.
One runs my old settings on the new Score, buying between 20 and 45 and taking profit from 80: 1.35 Bitcoin, about A$173,300.
One runs the new settings, buying anywhere under 45 and taking profit from 75: 1.55 Bitcoin, about A$194,000.

Here’s the catch. With the new settings, the plan started taking profit in late November 2024, with Bitcoin just under US$99,000. Bitcoin kept climbing for another ten months and topped 27% higher. At the top, this investor held less than half the Bitcoin of the one who never sold, with about A$82,900 sitting in cash. That would have felt wrong for most of a year. Then the bear market came, and the cash bought back in at much lower prices in February and March 2026.

I ran the same test from eight different start dates between 2013 and 2024. The new settings finished ahead of the old ones from every one of them.

One warning, and it matters more than normal here. Every reading in the Score’s history has been worked out after the fact with today’s model, not read live at the time. So this backtest is a fair test of the rules against past cycles, with the benefit of hindsight on the Score. It isn’t a promise about the next cycle.

Jake’s Workbench

If you built a plan before Saturday, it now runs on the upgraded Score, and it’s worth five minutes. A floor of 20 on the new Score is a different plan to a floor of 20 on the old one.

Here’s what the plan builder does with your number:

You set a total to buy, or a total to sell.
It ladders that total across 5-point bands of the CSH Score.
You choose how big the first and last orders are.
It marks each order filled as its band is hit.

It now shows the dollar price behind each band too, so a range turns into prices you can actually picture. Today a CSH Score of 45 is about US$91,900 and 75 is about US$125,000.

Why the sell side matters so much to me. Last year I spoke to hundreds of SMSF trustees putting six-figure lump sums into Bitcoin near the top, set and forget. On the upgraded model, the CSH Score sat above 75 on 111 of the 123 days from July to October 2025. I wasn’t above it either. I bought at the end of August last year with the CSH Score at 76, and again in November at 68. Small buys, but made with my gut, not my head. With the plan I run now, August was a month for taking profit and November was a month for waiting.

A good mate who’s setting up an SMSF asked me over the weekend why he shouldn’t just buy the same amount every month and forget about it. For the S&P 500, I mostly agree. It doesn’t fall by half every four years. Bitcoin has fallen by at least half after every cycle top in our history, most recently 53%. A plan that sizes each order to the Score uses that volatility instead of just sitting through it. It’s the middle ground between staring at charts twelve hours a day and buying blind.

Quick Hits

From the desk: Australian banks blocking transfers to crypto exchanges is getting worse. Frozen accounts, closed accounts, and customers grilled for hours on the phone and made to feel like criminals for moving their own money to a licensed, regulated Australian exchange. I’d love to say these calls are one-offs. They happen every day. If you’re moving a large amount: use a licensed Australian exchange registered with AUSTRAC, and have its account details and AUSTRAC registration ready before the fraud team calls, because they will. Be polite, answer honestly, don’t overshare. It’s frustrating, but that’s how the transfer goes through.
Everyone’s calling for Uptober. Maybe. A cool-off after a few strong months would be normal too. Bull markets don’t go up in a straight line, and every one in our history has had dips of 20% or more. Under a CSH Score of 45, those are the weeks my plan buys more.
If you want to trade this bull market, give it its own account. My long-term Bitcoin is built on the CSH Score in one place. Anything shorter term lives somewhere else. Don’t overtrade early in a bull.

Week Ahead

Thu 8 Oct, 4am AEST: minutes from the US Fed’s September meeting.
Wed 14 Oct, 10:30pm AEST: US inflation (CPI) for September.
Thu 15 Oct, 10:30pm AEST: US retail sales and producer prices.
Thu 29 Oct, 4am AEST: US Fed rate decision.
Sat 31 Oct: trials end for everyone who joined before Saturday’s upgrade.

Whatever those do, the plan’s answer is the same: under 45 it buys, above 75 it takes profit, in between it waits.

The Close

If you joined before Saturday, your trial now runs to Saturday 31 October and nothing is charged before then. That’s an extra fortnight from Tom and me to get to know the upgraded Score. If you’re new, it’s two weeks free and nothing is charged until day 15.

The first 100 members lock in A$19 a month for as long as they stay. After that it’s A$29.

For that you get the Score as it moves, a plan builder that turns it into orders, and every trade you make drawn against the cycle. The best time to write your sell rule is when selling is the last thing on your mind. That’s now.

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It's a bull market. Don't blow it this time.

Jake Pahor — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 11:14:42 GMT

Benjamin Cowen, one of the most respected analysts in crypto, posted on Monday: “I was wrong.” He’d been calling for a lower low in October. Bitcoin went through US$85,000 instead and he said so, in public, and copped a week of people dunking on him for it.

I was wrong too. Two weeks ago I told you I was leaning bearish into October and holding cash for it. Then Bitcoin closed a week back above its 50-week moving average, and this week it closed another 4% higher, sitting 8% above it. The market has answered the question, and it doesn’t care what I think.

There’s a line I keep coming back to: strong opinions, loosely held. Be fully committed to your view once you’ve made it, and drop it the moment the data says you’re wrong. The people who lose in this market aren’t the ones who get it wrong. Everyone gets it wrong at some point. They’re the ones who argue with the price for six months.

So this issue is the guide I wish someone had handed me in 2021. Where we are in the cycle, what each phase has looked like in the history, what the dips look like from here, and the do’s and don’ts that cost me real money to learn. Tom and I have fifteen years in crypto between us and nearly five of those at an Australian exchange watching people get this wrong at scale. If there was ever a time to pay attention, it’s now.

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CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score closed the week at 42.9, up from 37.4 last Sunday. Lower than on 55% of days in our history.
Bitcoin: US$84,489 in our history on Sunday, about A$120,200. Up 4.4% on the week, 44% above the 1 July low, 32% under the October 2025 top.
The 50-week moving average is about US$78,200 (Bitstamp weekly). Bitcoin is 8% above it. Last week’s candle was the first weekly close above it since November. This week’s candle closes Monday 10am our time and would be the second.
The bull market support band, the 20-week average and 21-week exponential average, sits at about US$70,300 to US$73,700.
My plan: buys between a CSH Score of 10 and 35, and takes profit above 80. A Score of 80 is about US$152,000 at today’s map. No order since August.

What the reading changes: the plan bought nothing again this week, and that’s the problem. The history below says that once a bull market starts, the Score rarely comes back under 35. A plan waiting for it mostly sits in cash for a year. So I’m changing the buy range this week, and the spare cash I was holding for October is going in on a schedule. Details at the workbench.

Where we are

Twelve months since the top is Wednesday week, 7 October. So I went back and looked at what Bitcoin was doing at the 12-month mark of the last three tops.

December 2018, twelve months after the 2017 top: Bitcoin was at the low. The exact low was two days earlier. CSH Score 23.5.

November 2022, twelve months after the 2021 top: the low, to the day. Score 20.

November 2014, twelve months after the 2013 top: Score 6.8, 45 days before the low, and the price still had another 54% to fall.

Twelve months after every prior top, Bitcoin was at or heading into the bottom of its bear market. This cycle, ten days out from the mark, it’s 44% above a low that was set three months ago, and the Score is 43. That’s not a bear market at its low. It’s the shape of a bear that finished early, and shallow: 53% off the top against 76% to 83% in the last three.

The other signals point the same way. A weekly close above the 50-week moving average after 45 weeks under it, with the Score under 50 on the day, is the profile of every reclaim that started a bull market in our history. The one trap that fired with the Score at 65 was 2022; this one fired at 37. Add the ETF money coming back (US$2.4 billion into the US spot Bitcoin ETFs last week, the most since October 2025, per The Block on Friday) and the picture is consistent.

I’m not calling the bottom. I’m saying the probabilities have moved, and a plan should move with them.

The four phases

Every Bitcoin cycle in our history has run the same four phases. Here’s each one, with the numbers from the last three cycles.

Phase one, early bull. From the low until the CSH Score first reaches 50. This is the quiet, boring, doubted stretch. It took 142 days in 2023, 146 days in 2019 and 720 days in the 2015 grind. Bitcoin roughly doubled from the low each time (1.9x, 1.9x, 6x in the long one). Nobody believes it while it’s happening. This cycle we’re 88 days from the low and the Score is 43. Still phase one.

Phase two, wealth creation. Score 50 to 80. This is where the money is made and where the noise comes back. In 2023 it ran from April 2023 to March 2024. The narratives arrive here: ICOs in 2017, DeFi and NFTs in 2021, the ETFs and the treasury companies in 2024. The biggest pullback inside this phase was 20% in 2023, 36% in 2017, and 61% in 2019 when COVID hit. Twenty per cent drops with the Score in the 60s are normal, not a signal.

Phase three, distribution. Score 80 and above. The first time the Score crossed 80, Bitcoin still had 1.8x to 2.5x left to run to the top, and between 25 days (2017) and 576 days (2024) to get there. That’s the part people get wrong about a sell rule: 80 isn’t the top, it’s the start of the part where you sell into strength. Each bull spent 26, 178 and 90 days above 80. That’s your window.

Phase four, destruction. The bear market: how far Bitcoin fell from the top to the next low, and how long it took. 83% in 363 days, 76% in 376 days, 53% in 267 days. The three bulls before this one each ran 1,051 to 1,068 days from low to top, seventeen days apart across three cycles. I’m not predicting this one matches. I am saying the shape has been the same every time, and the people who did well were the ones who knew which phase they were in.

What the dips look like from here

If we’re in phase one, here’s what the history says to expect. After each reclaim that started a bull market, the first twelve months had several pullbacks of 10% to 25%. 2020 had seven of them. 2023 had three, of 16% to 20%. 2015 had three, up to 32%. And in all three, Bitcoin never closed a single week back under the 50-week moving average. The dips bought back to the bull market support band, or close to it, and made higher lows.

The one that broke was 2019. By the time Bitcoin closed back above the 50-week moving average it had already rallied 80% off its low and the Score was 47, then it ran to 70 in seven weeks. That reclaim came late in the move, not early, and within a year Bitcoin had fallen 61% through COVID. This one came 38% off the low with the Score at 37, so it doesn’t fit that profile. But that’s the tell to watch: a weekly close back under the 50-week moving average, about US$78,200 today, and I stop calling it a bull.

So: expect dips. Plan for them. In a bull market they’ve been the best entries you get.

The do’s

Respect the trend. Bitcoin is above its 50-week moving average and its support band. Until a weekly close says otherwise, the trend is up, and the market doesn’t care what you thought in August.

Allocate early. Early in a bull and late in a bear is when you take the most risk, and you pull it back as the Score rises. I tested this against every reclaim that started a bull market. A plan that only bought under a Score of 35 bought nothing at all in the first year after the 2020 reclaim, and nine weeks out of 52 after 2023. The under-35 plan finished its first year with 79% to 100% less Bitcoin than a plan that bought the same amount every week regardless, and 19% less even in the slow 2015 grind. Spare cash spread over 13 weeks while the Score was under 50 got 96% to 99% of what going all in on day one got in 2020 and 2023, without the all-in risk, and 76% in 2015 and 2019 when the price ran faster than the tranches. The lesson is the reverse of the bear market one: cheap doesn’t come back on a schedule.

Be right and sit tight. Jesse Livermore’s line, and the hardest one. Once you’re positioned, the job is to hold through the 20% dips, not to trade them.

Write the exit before you need it. Mine is set in the plan builder already: taking profit above a Score of 80. Today that’s about US$152,000, and the number moves up as the cycle runs because the Score is measured against Bitcoin’s own trend. Set the rule now while you’re calm. When the Score is 85 and your group chat is a wall of screenshots, you won’t be.

Take profit into fiat. Altcoins into Bitcoin at the very least, but if you’ve made life-changing money, change your life. Buy the house. Pay down the loan. Put it into your business or yourself. The people who got hurt last cycle weren’t the ones who sold too early. They were the ones who held everything into the next bear because selling felt like quitting.

The don’ts

Don’t dwell on the bear market mistakes. I got mine wrong in 2021 and again this September. Fix the plan and move.

Don’t buy the winners you can see. Every screenshot of a 40x is one survivor from a crowd of people who lost. If you can’t find the denominator, assume the success rate is tiny.

Don’t keep buying a coin just because you already own it. If you wouldn’t buy it fresh at today’s price, sell it.

Don’t confuse a new narrative with a new paradigm. “Institutional adoption changes everything” was 2021’s line at US$69,000. The ETF floor at US$100,000 was 2025’s. Every cycle has one and every cycle reverts to trend.

Don’t wait for certainty. Waiting for the bottom to be confirmed is not the safe choice, it’s the one that cost the most in every cycle we have data for.

Don’t follow someone’s conviction. Mine included. Follow a rule you wrote down, and check the rule against the history, not against the loudest account you follow.

Don’t send your SMSF’s Bitcoin to a wallet you don’t control, and don’t chase yield. Luna, Celsius, Wonderland and Strongblock all paid me tuition on that one.

Jake’s Workbench

Three things this week.

One. I’m changing the plan again. The buy range goes from 10 to 35 to 20 to 45, and the spare cash I’d been keeping for an October low goes in over the next 13 weeks while the Score is under 50, on the plan’s schedule. The bottom of the range comes up because a Score under 20 almost never happens: since 2016 it’s been there for 110 days, all of them in the 2022 bear, and the last three cycle lows came in at 20.1, 20.0 and 20.6. A ladder that starts at 10 leaves orders waiting for a reading that doesn’t come. If a weekly candle closes back under the 50-week moving average, the spare-cash schedule pauses and the regular range keeps buying. Taking profit above 80 stays as it was. Two changes to the plan in a fortnight isn’t ideal. Sitting in cash through the start of a bull market is worse.

Two. The app. If you’ve logged in this week you’ll have seen it: new design, new logo, and the plan builder now takes a total. You set the amount you want to buy or sell, split it across the Score bands, and choose how big the first and last orders are. Every order gets marked filled as its band is hit. Plus an “I bought it” button that logs an order without a file upload. That’s the tool I’m using for the spare-cash schedule above.

Three. Paid switches on Thursday night. Every existing account gets a full 14-day free trial from the moment it flips, and the first 100 members lock A$19 a month for as long as they stay. After that it’s A$29. Tom and I both work full time, and we’ve put two years of nights and weekends and a fair bit of our own money into this. We love it and we’d also like it to pay for itself. More on that at the close.

Quick Hits

US spot Bitcoin ETFs took in US$2.4 billion last week, the biggest weekly inflow since 10 October 2025, and turned positive for the year. Monday alone was US$999 million (The Block, 26 Sep).
Cowen again, because it matters: he said on Monday he was wrong about a Q4 low and that he deserved to be dunked on. I’d rather follow someone who admits they were wrong than someone who deletes the tweet.
CBA’s economists moved their RBA call forward: a 25 basis point rise to 4.60% on Tuesday, on oil above US$100 and inflation running hotter than the RBA expected (CBA, 21 Sep). Markets have it at about 90%.
Bitcoin is 44% above its July low and the CSH Score is 43. The last three times the Score first crossed 43 in a new cycle, the top was still 4.4x to 28x away and 18 months to two and a half years out. Not a prediction. A base rate.

Week Ahead

Mon 28 Sep, 10am AEST: weekly close. Above US$78,200 and it’s the second close above the 50-week moving average.
Tue 29 Sep, 2:30pm AEST: RBA decision. A hike is priced.
Wed 30 Sep, 11:30am AEST: Australian monthly inflation (ABS).
Thu 1 Oct, 10:30pm AEST: US inflation (PCE).
Fri 2 Oct, 10:30pm AEST: US jobs report.
Thu 1 Oct, night: Crypto Super Hub goes paid.
Wed 7 Oct: twelve months since the top.

Whatever those do, the plan’s answer is the same: under 45 it buys, over 80 it takes profit, in between it waits.

The Close

Two years of Sunday nights went into this and it has never cost anyone a cent. On Thursday night that changes. Crypto Super Hub goes paid: two weeks free for everyone, nothing charged until day 15, then A$19 a month for the first hundred members, held for as long as you stay. After the hundred, it's A$29.

For that you get the CSH Score, the plan builder with the buy and sell ladders, every trade you've made drawn against the Score, and the exchange file import. Less than most people spend on streaming. About four coffees.

There's no discount and no countdown, because the price is the price and the hundred is real. When they're gone, it's A$29 and it stays there.

Tom and I have been building towards this week for two years, and it's landing at the start of what the history says is the best part of the cycle to have a plan. The Score, the plan builder with both ladders, your own trades drawn against the cycle, and every Sunday brief from here, for a few coffees a month. If you've read these on a Sunday night thinking you should sort your plan out, this is the week. Start the trial, build the plan, and let's do this bull market properly.

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Is the Bitcoin bear over? Probably.

Jake Pahor — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 08:30:17 GMT

Everyone I talked to this month was waiting for a September low. Bitcoin went the other way.

It had every excuse to fall. The Fed raised rates on Thursday morning our time, the first rise since 2023. The Bank of Japan went to its highest rate in 31 years the day after. The crypto market structure bill failed in the US Senate by one vote. The spot Bitcoin ETFs had their biggest outflow since June. And on Friday our time Bitcoin rallied more than 5% in a day, squeezed about US$190 million of short positions in an hour, and by Sunday was sitting back above its 50-week moving average for the first time since November.

The thing people skip is what that reclaim has meant before. So I went through our score history, every day since 2012, and pulled out every time Bitcoin closed a week back above the 50-week MA after a proper stretch under it. Six times. Four started a bull market. Two were traps. The tells that separated them are below, and so is where this one sits.

And I changed my own plan this week. I’ll tell you why at the workbench.

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CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score closed the week at 37.4, up from 36.8 last Sunday. Lower than on 65% of days in our history.
Bitcoin: US$81,062 in our history on Sunday, about A$113,800. Up 4.9% on the week.
The 50-week moving average sits at about US$78,800 (TradingView, Bitstamp weekly, Sunday). Bitcoin is 3% above it. The weekly candle closes Monday 10am our time.
Support below: the bull market support band, about US$70,200 to US$72,600 on the same chart. A CSH Score of 30 is about US$69,700 today, so the band and a Score of 30 are stacked on top of each other again.
My plan: waiting, but with a wider net. It now buys between a CSH Score of 10 and 35 (it was 10 to 30 until Tuesday). A Score of 35 is about US$76,800 today. It hasn’t placed an order since August.

What the reading changes: the plan is 4 points and about US$4,000 from buying again. If we get the dip to the support band a lot of people are waiting for, that’s a Score around 30 and the plan buys on the Monday. If we don’t, the cash I’d set aside for a September low goes in on the plan’s schedule as the Score allows. I’m not calling the bear finished on one close. Consecutive weekly closes above the 50-week MA are the signal, and that’s still the test. But I stopped betting on a lower low this week, and the rest of this issue is why.

Six reclaims, four bottoms

In March 2023 I remember the exact feeling. Bitcoin had just closed a week back above its 50-week moving average at about US$27,000, and I was annoyed with myself. My SMSF had missed the November 2022 low at US$15,700 while the paperwork dragged, and now the price was 70% above it. Late to the party, I thought. Bitcoin went on to do nearly five times that price.

That’s the trap of the reclaim. It always arrives after the bounce, so it always feels late. So I wanted to know what it has actually meant.

The set-up is simple. Weekly closes since 2012. A reclaim is the first weekly close above the 50-week MA after at least a month under it. Then I measured what happened next.

October 2015, CSH Score 19.5 on the day. Held above the average for 134 weeks. A year later, 2.3 times higher.

May 2019, Score 47.5. Held 31 weeks. A year later, 1.5 times.

January 2020, Score 39.9. Back under the average within 8 weeks, then the COVID crash took it 35% below the reclaim. A trap.

May 2020, Score 39.6. Held 62 weeks. A year later, 6.3 times.

April 2022, Score 65.4. Closed back under the average the very next week and fell 58% from there. A trap, and the one everyone remembers.

March 2023, Score 41.9. Held 137 weeks, until last November. A year later, 2.5 times.

Four real, two traps. The real ones held above the average for at least 31 weeks and never dipped more than 7% below the reclaim close in the following six months. The traps were back under within two months.

The tells

The candle itself told you less than I expected. The 2023 reclaim was enormous, 32% in a week, closing 17% above the average. But the May 2020 reclaim that started a 6x run closed just 2% above it. The 2022 trap closed 0.5% above. Size helps, but it isn’t the tell.

Two things separated the real ones from the traps.

First, how long Bitcoin had been under the 50-week moving average. The real reclaims came after about a year under it: 62 weeks, 49, 49, and the COVID one at 7 (a crash and a V-shaped recovery, not a bear). The traps came after 4 weeks and 13. A market that has spent a year under its 50-week MA has done its time, and a year is roughly what a Bitcoin bear takes: the last three ran 13 months, 12 and 12 from top to low, and the reclaim came four to nine months after the low. A market that dipped under for a month hasn’t done any of that.

Second, the CSH Score on the day. Every real reclaim fired with the Score between 19.5 and 47.5, meaning Bitcoin was still historically cheap when it turned. The 2022 trap fired at 65.4, historically expensive. It was a bear market rally inside a bear market, and the Score said so.

Depth of the bear is the one that’s mixed. The three big bears bottomed 77% to 86% under their top. The two shallow ones, 2019 and COVID, bottomed about 50% down, and one of those reclaims was real and one was a trap.

Where this one sits

Bitcoin has been under the 50-week average for 45 weeks. The CSH Score is 37.4. On the two tells that mattered, this looks like the real ones.

The low was 53% under the October top, which is the shallow-bear profile, and this week’s candle is on the timid side: 5% for the week, 3% above the average. The traps looked like that too. So did May 2020.

Here’s the number that stopped me waiting. At every real reclaim, Bitcoin was already 65% to 80% off its low. Every single one felt late on the day. A year later they were 1.5 to 6.3 times higher. This week we’re 38% off the July low.

So the plan is this. A weekly close back under the 50-week MA in the next eight weeks and it was a trap; both traps in our history failed inside that window. If that happens the plan keeps buying under 35 and I keep my mouth shut about bull markets. Consecutive closes above it that hold and I’ll say the bear is done, out loud, and the plan will have missed part of the move. That’s the trade I’ve always chosen. What I won’t do anymore is sit on cash waiting for a price the history says usually doesn’t come back. And even at US$81,000 the CSH Score says Bitcoin is still historically cheap: 37.4 is lower than on 65% of days since 2013. You don't need to perfectly time the exact bottom to make good money.

Jake’s Workbench

Three things this week.

One. I changed my plan. It bought Bitcoin under a CSH Score of 30. From 22 August the Score sat between 30 and 39, the plan did nothing, and Bitcoin went from US$78,000 to US$81,000 without it. So I went back to the score history and asked which buy threshold ends with the most Bitcoin, same sell rule, from three different start dates: 2017, 2019 and the November 2021 top. Under 35 won every time. Under 30 spends too long waiting. Since the start of 2023 there have been 134 days with the Score under 30 and 254 under 35, nearly double the buying days for the same money. Selling from 80 came first or tied first in every window too, so that end of the plan stays. The range is now 10 to 35. It took 20 seconds to change and a month of the plan sitting idle to realise I should.

Two. My own trades. The rebuilt Today page draws every buy I’ve ever made against the Score on the day. The ones I’m proud of sit in the 20 to 30 band. There are also dots in the 70 to 80 band from 2024 and 2025, when the Score said Bitcoin was historically expensive and I should have been taking profit, not adding. I built the tool and it still stung. That’s what it’s for.

Three. Two dates. On 6 September I wrote down the two conditions for changing my spare-cash rules: the 12-month mark from the 7 October 2025 top, and a weekly close above the 50-week MA that holds. The first arrives in 17 days. The second is being tested right now. Both in the same fortnight. If both land, the spare cash stops waiting for a lower low and goes in on a schedule too.

Product note: the app’s Today page was rebuilt this week. Your plan in one sentence with the next order, every trade you’ve imported drawn against the Score, and a trade file upload that takes exports from the main Australian and global exchanges.

Quick Hits

The Fed raised 25 basis points to 3.75–4.00% on Thursday morning our time, 12 votes to none, the first rise since 2023. One more is priced for December. Bitcoin’s low for the week came before the decision. It rallied through it.
The Bank of Japan went to 1.25% on Friday, its highest rate in 31 years. Same story.
The CLARITY Act, the US crypto market structure bill, failed its Senate procedural vote 49 to 50 on Tuesday. Bitcoin dipped under US$75,000 that day and was above US$81,000 by Friday.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs: US$450 million out on the day of the Senate vote, the biggest outflow since June. US$159 million back in two days later.
If you have a CSH account and this is the first Sunday brief you’ve received: we added app members to this list this week. It’s one email a week. Unsubscribe at the bottom if it’s not for you.

Week Ahead

Mon 21 Sep, 10am AEST: the weekly close. Above US$78,800 and the reclaim is on the board. The close after it matters more.
Thu 24 Sep, 11:30am: Australian jobs numbers (ABS).
Fri 25 Sep, 6pm AEST: quarterly options expiry on Deribit, about US$14.7 billion of Bitcoin options, heaviest open interest around US$72,000. One more reason the support band could get a visit.
Tue 29 Sep: RBA rate decision.
Wed 30 Sep, 11:30am: Australian monthly inflation (ABS).
Thu 1 Oct, 10:30pm AEST: US inflation (PCE).
Fri 2 Oct, 10:30pm AEST: US jobs report.
Wed 7 Oct: twelve months since the top.

Whatever those do, the plan’s answer is the same: under 35 it buys, over 80 it sells, in between it waits.

The Close

If the market has proven you wrong this month, don’t fight it. Early in a bull and late in a bear is when to take the most risk, and it never feels like it at the time. The way to actually do that, with a job and a family and no time to watch a chart, is to decide the rule now and let the schedule take the decision away from you.

Two weeks free to write yours down: the live CSH Score, the plan builder and your own record against the Score. Cancel before the trial ends and you’re not charged.

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When to sell Bitcoin: a rule that beat HODL

Jake Pahor — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 09:06:50 GMT

In December 2021 I was less than a year into crypto and sitting on the biggest gains of my life. FTM, LUNA, a handful of alts I’d been early to. I remember the exact thought: that’s a tidy profit, maybe I should sell some. And then the other one: we’re going higher. So I held. Some of it was locked in staking pools, so in 2022 when I finally wanted out, I couldn’t. I rode the whole thing back down. Tuition fees, I call it now. I’ve got the scars to prove it.

Everyone I talk to this year is trying to buy the low. Is it in, will it dip further, should I go all in now. Nobody asks when to sell. I didn’t either, and that’s the question that actually cost me.

So this week I tested it. I took the CSH Score history, every day of Bitcoin since 2012, and ran three hypothetical investors through it, each putting A$500 a week into Bitcoin from January 2017. Nearly ten years, three bull markets, three bears. One never sells. One panics and sells, then buys back late, the way most people actually behave. One follows a written rule. The rule finished with 74% more Bitcoin and A$1.6 million more than never selling. It’s below, and the version I’d run this cycle is at the end.

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CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score closed the week at 36.8, down from last Sunday. Lower than on 68% of days since 2012.
Bitcoin: US$77,303 in our history on Sunday, about A$107,800. Last Monday’s weekly candle closed at US$80,339, right on the 50-week moving average, and this week it’s trading back under it. The 50-week MA sits at about US$79,600 (TradingView, Bitstamp weekly, 13 Sep).
Support below: the bull market support band, roughly US$70,100 to US$71,800 on the same chart, and a CSH Score of 30 is about US$69.7k today. Those two levels are stacked on top of each other.
Golden cross, two weeks on: I said the first month after one is usually a sell-off and the year after is usually up. The sell-off part arrived on schedule.
My plan: waiting. It buys between 10 and 30. It stopped on 22 August when the Score crossed 30 and it hasn’t placed an order since.

What the reading changes: nothing, yet. Bitcoin is being squeezed between the 50-week MA above and the support band below. Rejections off the 50-week MA in past cycles tended to happen fast, within a few weeks, so the longer we hang around just under it, the better I like it. The signal I’m waiting on to call the bear finished is consecutive weekly closes above the 50-week MA. Yes, waiting for that means missing part of the move. That is the exact reason a plan buys the lows on a schedule instead of on a feeling.

Three investors, one rule

Here’s the set-up. Three hypothetical investors, each putting A$500 into Bitcoin every Monday from 2 January 2017 to now. That’s 506 weeks and A$253,000 each.

The first never sells (HODL). A$500 in, every Monday, no exceptions.

The second does what most people actually do. Buys every week, panic-sells everything after a 50% fall, and buys back once the CSH Score is over 60 again, when it feels safe.

The third follows a written rule. Buys from the reserve while the CSH Score is under 35, larger buys the lower it goes. Sells 10% of the Bitcoin held every week the Score is 80 or higher, 20% above 90. The money from the sales sits in the reserve for the next time the Score is under 35.

Never sold: 19.87 BTC, worth A$2.14 million. Eight and a half times the money in, after a 77% fall along the way.

Sold the bottom, bought back the top: no Bitcoin, A$458,000 in cash. Less than double the money in. Four round trips: sold at A$10k in early 2018, bought back at A$13k, sold at A$6k, bought back at A$12k, sold at A$43k in May 2022, bought back at A$67k, sold at A$93k this March. I want to be clear that every one of those moves felt sensible on the day. That’s what makes it the most common path.

Followed the rule: 34.56 BTC plus A$35,000 in cash, worth A$3.76 million. Nearly fifteen times the money in. Worst fall 37%.

Seventy-four per cent more Bitcoin than never selling. A$1.6 million more. Half the drawdown. Same money in.

What the rule actually did, and when it looked wrong

It sold 42 times, A$3.3 million worth, at an average of A$105,000. Twenty-eight of those sales were in 2021 at an average of A$57,000. Nine were between March and December 2024 at an average of A$133,000. Four were in January and February 2025 at an average of A$160,000. Then it stopped, because the CSH Score never got back to 80. The October 2025 top scored 75.5.

So the rule sold a year early and well under the top. At the top it was holding a third as much Bitcoin as the never-seller and A$2.6 million in cash, watching the price run to A$190,000 without it. For most of 2025 the rule looked like the wrong call, and if I’d been running it I’d have copped it in the replies.

Then the Score fell under 35 in February this year and the rule bought back, 23 Mondays at an average of A$96,000. Add the 2022 buys at an average of A$30,000 and it bought A$3.4 million worth of Bitcoin back at an average of A$65,000. Sold at 105, bought at 65. That gap is the extra Bitcoin.

This is the thing about a working exit rule. It sells while everyone’s still bullish, it looks stupid for a while, and it’s right over the whole cycle. In 2021 I had nothing to follow, so I followed the little voice instead.

Even from the worst week to start

Run the same three investors from the Monday after the November 2021 top. Never selling ends with 2.02 BTC. The rule ends with 2.65 BTC, 31% more, and its worst fall was 23% instead of 50%. At the October 2025 top the never-seller was ahead by A$69,000. Eleven months later he isn’t.

Jake’s Workbench

Two things from the model this week.

One. I asked for the whole grid: buy under 25, 30, 35 or 40, sell from 60 through 90, 5% to 25% a week. Buying under 35 beat buying under 30 from every start date. Under 30 spends too long waiting; only 22 days of 2023 scored under 30. My plan buys between 10 and 30. The history says I’m a touch too strict, and I haven’t changed it yet. Selling from 75 and from 80 tied; from 70 was slightly behind. The exact number barely matters. Having one is what matters.

Two. My SMSF made its first Bitcoin buy in January 2023, with the CSH Score at 15. So I modelled a fund starting then with a hypothetical A$150,000 rollover. Bought on a flat monthly schedule over two years, it ends up with 2.69 BTC, worth about A$290,000 today. The same A$150,000 on a plan that buys harder while the Score is low ends up with 4.79 BTC, worth about A$517,000. Seventy-eight per cent more Bitcoin from the same cash, and the fund is three and a half times its starting size in under four years. My own buying in 2023 was messier than either of those, and I bought cautiously into the cheapest Bitcoin of the decade. Caution was the expensive option.

Product note: the app’s Today page was rebuilt this week. Your plan’s buy range drawn on the Score, each plan in one sentence with the next order in large type, and your record of orders against the Score on one chart. More on that once it settles.

Quick Hits

The US Fed decides rates on Thursday at 4am our time. After Friday’s US inflation print, markets are pricing a rate rise, not a cut, at close to 90% (CME FedWatch via CBS News, 11 Sep). My plan has no Fed input. It has a Score range.
The US Senate votes on Wednesday at 4:15am our time on whether to even proceed with the CLARITY Act, the crypto market structure bill. It needs 60 votes. Prediction markets had it under 20% a week ago.
The RBA meets on Tuesday 29 September. Futures were pricing about an 80% chance of a rise as of 7 September.
From 1 July 2027 the 50% CGT discount is replaced for individuals, trusts and partnerships by cost-base indexation and a 30% minimum tax on gains. It passed in June. The change doesn’t name super funds; the ATO’s SMSF page still shows the one-third discount. If your exit plan runs into 2027, this belongs in the conversation with your accountant.
Mt Gox’s creditor repayment deadline is 31 October. It’s a deadline, not a scheduled sale.

Week Ahead

Two levels and one date. Above: the 50-week MA at about US$79,600. Consecutive weekly closes above it and I flip bull in public. Below: the support band and a Score of 30, stacked around US$70k. If the Score comes back under 30, my plan starts buying again on the Monday and I’ll tell you the size. The date is Thursday 4am, the Fed. Whatever it does, the plan’s answer is the same as it was on Monday.

The Close

Here’s the playbook for this cycle, as plainly as I can put it. Buy on a schedule while Bitcoin is historically cheap, meaning a CSH Score under 30 to 35. Stop when it isn’t. Sell a slice a week while it’s historically expensive, meaning a Score of 75 to 80 and up. Keep the proceeds for the next time it’s cheap. Write all of it down before you need it, because you will not be able to think straight when the Score hits 85 and your portfolio is up four times.

Livermore said it a hundred years ago: be right and sit tight. Sitting tight is easy when you’ve already written down what you’ll do.

If you want to write yours down, the whole app is free for two weeks: the live CSH Score, the Plan Builder and your record against the Score.

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12 golden crosses. Bullish, just not yet.

Jake Pahor — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 10:13:38 GMT

Everyone I talk to thinks a golden cross is the most bullish thing that can happen to a Bitcoin chart. It’s days away, so I checked.

A golden cross is when the average price over the last 50 days climbs above the average over the last 200. It’s a lagging indicator. It doesn’t predict a trend, it confirms one that started months ago. And everyone remembers what came after the famous ones. What nobody talks about is the first month, which is often a sell-off.

So instead of going off vibes, I went through all 12 golden crosses in our score history, which runs back to 2012, with the CSH Score alongside each one. Whether Bitcoin was higher or lower a month later turned out to be a coin flip. A year later was a different story, and the score on the day of the cross separated the ones that ran from the ones that didn’t.

The live score, your plan and the new My Plans page are all in the app, free to try right now:

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CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score: 38.8, up 1.0 over seven days (37.8 last Sunday)
Bitcoin: US$79,986, up 2.9% over seven days (app, 6 Sep)
Band: 30 to 40, where Bitcoin has spent 14.4% of its history
Percentile: bottom 35% since 2012
Days with a CSH Score under 30 this bear: 112. Days under 20: 0
50-week moving average: about US$80,100, price sitting just under it
Day 334 since the October 7 top. Day 365 is October 7

What the reading changes: nothing in my plan. It buys weekly with the CSH Score between 10 and 30 and waits above it, so it’s been waiting since the score crossed 30 on August 22. My bigger buys are parked under 20, and the score bottomed at 20.6 in July without getting there. A CSH Score of 30 maps to about US$70,200 today, which is also the bull market support band on the weekly chart. If a pullback comes, that’s the level I’m watching, because it’s where the plan switches back on.

Twelve golden crosses, scored

Here’s every one in our score history, which starts in 2012, with the CSH Score on the day it fired and where Bitcoin was a year later.

The first month is 50/50. Five of the twelve crosses were lower 30 days later, seven were higher. Five of the twelve also dropped more than 10% at some point in the first 90 days. April 2019 went up 46% in a month. February 2020 fell 39%. Whether Bitcoin goes up or down in the weeks after a golden cross is a coin flip. It has never been a reliable short-term buy signal.

A year later, the score is the tell. The CSH Score is our 0 to 100 read on whether Bitcoin is cheap or expensive against its own history back to 2012. Low means cheap. Six of the twelve crosses fired with the score between 15 and 50, meaning Bitcoin was still historically cheap when the signal came: July 2015, October 2015, April 2019, May 2020, February 2023, October 2023. All six were higher a year later, median gain 118%. Three crosses since 2021 fired with the score at 64 or above, Bitcoin already expensive. Two of those three lost money over the next year: 59% in 2021, 32% in 2025. Same pattern on the chart. The difference was whether the market was starting a move or finishing one.

The first cross after a bear market sometimes fakes. July 2015 and February 2020 were both the first cross after a low. Both reversed inside nine weeks, and both times the second attempt held: 878 days in 2015, 394 days in 2020. In 2019 and 2023 the first one held. Two of the last four recoveries needed a second go, so if this one reverses, that’s not the recovery ending.

The closest match to today is February 2023. CSH Score 37.6 at the cross, 38.8 now. Bitcoin dropped 12.5% over the following month and the score fell back to 32. A year later it was up 90%. I’m not saying this year copies that one. I’m saying the one time the signal fired with the score where it is now, Bitcoin fell for the first month and finished the year up 90%. Short-term bearish, long-term very bullish.

Jake’s Workbench

Tom shipped the new My Plans page from Europe this week, and it’s changed how I start the day.

The top of the page is one card. Mine this morning says: CSH Score 38.8, outside your range of 10 to 30, your plan says wait. The US$2,161 it would have bought this week stays in cash. Then an email lands each morning saying the same thing. Two questions answered before coffee: is the score inside my range, and if not, how far outside.

Below that is the plan’s own record. Three orders since June 24, all inside the range, average price US$63,215, with the CSH Score in the low 20s on every one of them. And below that, once your history is imported, every trade you’ve ever made plotted against the score on the day you made it, plus a bar chart of which score bands your money actually went in at.

That last chart is the honest one. Mine says 30.5% of my Bitcoin dollars went in at a score of 20 to 30, 30.5% at 30 to 40, and 39% at 60 to 80. That last 39% was all before we built the system. The plan exists so it never happens again.

An SMSF trustee DMed two feature requests this week: a confirmed-uptrend signal, and a long-term versus short-term read on a buy. Both are on the board. The founding cohort is 100 people, that number is real, and this is what your feedback does to the product.

Quick Hits

US CPI lands Friday night our time (Friday 11 Sep, 8:30am ET). PPI the day before.
The CLARITY Act gets its Senate procedural vote on Tuesday 15 September, 2:15pm ET. It needs 60 votes to proceed.
The Fed decides on Wednesday 16 September US time, 4am Thursday here. The quiet period started yesterday.
The concessional contributions cap went up to $32,500 on 1 July. If you salary sacrifice into a fund holding crypto, that’s the new ceiling.
Scam and hack volume across the desk is rising every week. Unique passwords, a dedicated email for exchange accounts, 2FA on everything, and paste anything suspicious into Claude or ChatGPT before you act on it. A screenshot and the question “is this legit” is the cheapest security audit you’ll ever run.

Week Ahead

The golden cross will probably print between Tuesday and Wednesday, and every feed you follow will notice. The number I’m watching instead is the weekly close, Monday morning our time: a close over about US$80,100 is the first weekly finish above the 50-week average in this recovery, the signal that ended the last three bears. Below it, and I’m still watching US$70,200, the level where the CSH Score reads 30 and my plan starts buying again.

Then next week gets loud: the Senate vote Tuesday, the Fed early Thursday our time, quad witching Friday. Now is the week to be set up, not the week after.

The Close

Strong opinions, held loosely. I’ve got a strong one: I want a pullback into my range, and I think the FOMO I’m hearing on the phone every day says the market needs one. If Bitcoin closes a week above the 50-week average instead, I’m wrong, and I’ll change my mind that day rather than wait for the market to prove me right. There are no awards for being right in the markets. The only award is making money, and the way you keep it is a plan written down before the noise starts.

Write yours down this week. The score’s public, the plan builder’s free to try, and the market’s about to get busy.

Jake

3 Bear Markets Ended at This Line

Jake Pahor — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 09:05:53 GMT

I got back from a week of fishing to the busiest desk I’ve seen since January.

Not busy with trades. Busy with paperwork. People rushing to open accounts, pass verification and land deposits while Bitcoin put in a 22.8% week, its biggest since March 2023. A few weeks ago I wrote that the time to get your house in order is before the market moves. This was the week that stopped being theoretical.

And now the whole market is staring at one level. Tonight’s issue is about that level, the three times a bear market has ended on it, and the one time it faked everyone out.

The CSH Score is 37.6. Mid cycle, up 5.4 on the week, and here’s what that means in practice: my plan stopped buying on August 22, when the score crossed 30 after 79 straight days below it. That’s not me making a call. That’s the plan doing what it was written to do.

See where the score sits today

CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score: 37.6, Mid Cycle, +5.4 (+16.8%) on the week
Percentile: bottom 33% of all readings since 2012
Bitcoin: US$78,153 (A$109,002) +0.47% on the week after last week’s +22.8%
Day 327 since the October top; the bear’s low so far is US$58,551 on July 1, a 53.1% drawdown
115 days this bear at a CSH Score of 30 or under, every single one of them in the 20–30 band, and the CSH Score never went below 20

What the reading changes: above 30, my scheduled buying is paused. Back under 30, it restarts mechanically. Under 20, the spare-cash tiers deploy. The score moved, the plan answered, I went fishing.

Has this happened before? The 50-week test

Bitcoin’s 50-week moving average sits at about $81,000. Price tagged it on Friday and backed off to 3% below. If you’ve been in crypto for a cycle or two you know why everyone’s watching it: in bulls this level is where dips go to bounce, and in bears it’s where rallies go to die.

So I went through our full score history, 5,322 days back to 2012, and pulled every bear market ending. Three of them: 2015, 2018–19, 2022–23. I wanted the honest answer to the question half the desk asked me this week. Has this happened before, and what happened next?

Here’s what the history shows.

Every one of the last three bears ended the same way: a first weekly close back above the 50-week MA after the bottom.

October 25, 2015.

May 5, 2019.

March 19, 2023.

Three different bears, three different worlds. Same signal. And in all three cases, the same three things followed. Price never closed a single week back below the level in the next six months. The bear-market low was never touched again. And twelve months later Bitcoin was up 55%, 128% and 141% from the reclaim close.

One more detail I didn’t expect: March 19, 2023, the last reclaim week, was a +32.1% weekly candle. The biggest weekly gain since then? Last week’s +22.8%. The market is rhyming loudly enough that it’s worth saying out loud.

Now the part most analysis skips.

There is exactly one false signal in the whole dataset. April 3, 2022: one weekly close above the 50-week MA in the middle of the bear. It failed the very next week, and the final low came seven months later, 64% lower.

The difference between that fake-out and the three real ones isn’t on the price chart. It’s in the score. The April 2022 close happened with the CSH Score at 65.4, no capitulation behind it, price still expensive against its own cycle. The three real reclaims came off score floors of 22.1, 14.6 and 2.3, with reclaim-week scores of 47.5, 41.9 and 19.5.

Today: score 37.6, coming off a floor of 20.6. That’s the profile of the real ones, not the fake.

So is the low in? Two honest cautions before anyone gets excited, and they’re the same two nagging at me.

First, the boxes this bear hasn’t ticked. It’s the shallowest drawdown in the history, 53% against 75 to 83%, and the CSH Score never went below 20. But the 2018–19 bear bottomed and turned without ever printing sub-20 either. The “final flush” is a pattern, not a law.

Second, timing. The three real reclaims came 284, 141 and 118 days after their bottoms. If July 1 was the low, we’re at day 60. Bitcoin has never gone from a bear-market low to a held weekly close above the 50-week MA that quickly. Quick isn’t impossible. It’s just not what the history looks like.

Where does that leave us? The signal that ended the last three bears has not printed yet: a weekly close above the 50-week MA, held into the weeks that follow. What has printed is the setup: a deep score floor, a violent thrust off the low, and price knocking on the exact level. My own read, and it’s a read, not the data talking: I’m about 50/50, the most bullish I’ve been since the top. And the entire point of running a plan is that being 50/50 doesn’t paralyse me. Both outcomes already have instructions.

Jake’s Workbench

What I actually did this week: nothing. And I mean that as a flex.

The plan bought Bitcoin on a schedule for seven months, every one of those 115 days the CSH Score sat between 20 and 30. When the score crossed 30 on August 22, it stopped. I still hold cash reserved for a score under 20, which may simply never come. If this was the bottom, I bought the whole window on autopilot. If it wasn’t, the rules for the next leg down are already written.

I also ran one number that made the whole approach click. Take the same dollars since the October top, two ways. Buying every single day averaged US$76,551. Buying only on the days the score was 30 or under averaged US$64,759. Same money, 18.2% more Bitcoin, and the only difference is that one buyer had a written definition of cheap before the money moved.

The other thing in the Workbench: CSV import is live in My Plans, and I was the first user. I imported every Bitcoin buy my SMSF has made since August 2024 and looked at my own history against the score. A quarter of my buy dollars went in at a CSH Score above 70. All of it before we built the plan. Wednesday’s article is the full walkthrough, warts and all.

Quick Hits

Jackson Hole turned hawkish. New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh used his first keynote on Friday to say inflation is running too hot (PCE 3.7% over the year, 4.1% annualised over six months, his numbers) and to open the door to rate hikes. Futures markets moved a September hike from 35% to roughly 59% overnight, per CME data on August 28. Call it a coin flip.

The dates that matter: August CPI lands September 11, the Fed decides September 16. If they hike, it’s the first tightening crypto has faced since the 2022 bear. Worth respecting.

Elsewhere: gold gave back 3.2% this week, equities flat, VIX asleep at 14.4. Whatever moved Bitcoin last fortnight, it wasn’t a risk-on stampede across every asset.

Week Ahead

The week is one question: does Bitcoin hold near the 50-week MA, or get rejected hard?

Path one: Bitcoin closes a week above the 50-week MA and holds it. That’s the signal that ended the last three bears, and I flip bull.

Path two: a sharp rejection. Every bear since 2013 killed its rallies at this exact level, and I’d expect another trip lower in the range.

Friday night’s US jobs report is the one scheduled event with the weight to decide it.

Both paths already have instructions in my plan. Under a CSH Score of 30, buying restarts. Under 20, the tiers deploy more heavily. A weekly close above the 50-week MA that holds, and I’ll say so plainly and change my positioning language from 50/50 to bull.

The Close

Something different this week. These past few weeks I’ve been feeding every task I hate into Claude and turning the repeatable ones into scheduled automations. Client call logs, receipts, our whole weekly data capture. Hours of my week, gone, permanently.

It’s the same idea CSH is built on. Find the decision you make repeatedly, write down the rule, let a system run it. Whether it’s your admin or your Bitcoin buying, a written rule beats a gut call.

So here’s the challenge: write down the five tasks you hate most, feed the list to an AI, and ask which ones it can automate. Build one this week. The prize isn’t the hours back. It’s freeing your head up for the high-leverage decisions, your plan, your positioning, your next investment, while the systems handle everything else.

More next Sunday.

Jake

A 22% Week. A 50/50 Coin Flip.

Jake Pahor — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 11:50:35 GMT

Crypto Super Hub — The CSH Weekly Brief | August 23, 2026

Bitcoin jumped about 22% this week, its biggest weekly move in years. Roughly US$2.7 billion of short positions were liquidated in a single day on the way up, per Coinglass data, which Bloomberg reported as the largest short wipeout on record. Price touched $79,461 before settling near $76,500 on Sunday evening (Bitstamp).

And my inbox filled with one question, asked a dozen different ways: “Have I missed it?”

Half the internet says yes, the bottom is in, you’re too late. The other half says this is an obvious fake-out and new lows are coming. Both sides sound completely certain.

So this issue does one thing. I went back through 13 years of our data, found every week that looks like this one, and checked what happened next. The answer surprised me, and it isn’t what either camp is telling you.

Small confession before we start: I watched none of this live. I was on a fishing trip with no phone reception, and came back to a repriced market and a phone that wouldn’t stop buzzing. Why that didn’t matter is at the end.

CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score: 31.9, Mid Cycle (a week ago: 24.0, one of the sharpest weekly Score jumps of this bear)
BTC: about US$76,500 at Sunday evening’s reading, intraweek high $79,461, up roughly 22% on the week (Bitstamp)
The 79-day run is over. The Score sat at or below 30 from June 4 to August 21, and exited the band on Saturday
Still bottom 25% of all readings since 2012, about 39% below the October top of $124,774
Today’s Score band maps to $69,632–$86,377. The top of the 20s band sits at $69,632, roughly 9% below Sunday’s price

The reading changed, and my rules did what they were written to do: above 30, my plan stops buying. The spare cash I keep for a sub-20 reading stays put. You can watch the same number I checked from the boat ramp, free, updated hourly:

Check the live CSH Score

What happened the last 30 times Bitcoin did this

First, the method, in plain words. I took our full daily price and CSH Score history back to 2013 and pulled out every week where Bitcoin rose 18% or more. Big moves come in bursts, so back-to-back qualifying days count as one event.

That gives 46 events in 13 years. Three or four a year, and they almost never happen in the middle of a cycle. They show up at the extremes: near the top of bull markets, or deep in bear markets. That’s not a coincidence. A move this size is rarely new buyers showing up. It’s usually crowded short positions being forced to close all at once, and shorts only get that crowded after months of falling prices. This week fit the pattern exactly.

Thirty of the 46 events happened where we are right now: more than 30% below the all-time high. Here’s what followed, all 30 times, no cherry-picking.

Fifteen of them never let you back in. Price kept going, and the pre-pump lows never traded again.

The other fifteen gave the whole move back within six months. Some went on to make new lows.

Fifteen and fifteen. So when someone tells you this week proves the bottom is in, or proves it’s a trap, here’s the truth: 13 years of data cannot tell those two outcomes apart on the pump alone. Neither can they.

The part that isn’t a coin flip

The pump itself tells you very little. What happens in the weeks after the pump has told you a lot.

I went looking for the events that most resemble right now: a long stretch of low CSH Score readings, then one violent week that pushed the Score up through 30. It has happened four times before.

All four turned out to be the end of that bear market. The worst 30-day stretch after any of them was an 11% dip, and twelve months on they sat between +84% and +737%.

Then there’s the one that looked identical and wasn’t. July 2022: a 21% pump week, 65% below the high, CSH Score in the low 20s. The difference only showed up afterwards. The Score stalled at 28, never crossed 30, and four months later Bitcoin made its real bottom at $15,742. Late 2014 tells the same story twice: two 20%+ pump weeks with the CSH Score in single digits, both fully retraced, and that bear ran another year.

So the useful signal was never the green week. It was whether the CSH Score held above 30 and kept climbing in the weeks after. Today it reads 31.9. That is the number I’m watching for the next month, and you can watch it with me on the app.

One more finding, and it’s the one that should lower your heart rate: even in the four cases where the pump really was the turn, Bitcoin went sideways or down for about a month afterwards before the trend started. If this is the real thing, you have time to act like an adult about it. The feeling that you have to move this week is the squeeze talking, not the data.

So what do you do with a coin flip?

You stop trying to call it.

My own base case for months has been that this bear had further to run. This week moved hard against that view. If Bitcoin keeps closing above its long-term trend levels and the CSH Score holds above 30, I’ll retire that call, in public, in this newsletter.

But here’s the point: my buying never depended on that view. The plan bought every week through the whole stretch of readings in the 20s. At 31.9 it has stopped buying, because that rule was written down too: buy below 30, sit tight above it. If we drop back into the 20s, the buying starts again automatically. If we get under 20, spare cash goes in. And if we never see the 20s again, I’m already positioned. Being wrong about direction was never allowed to become expensive.

That’s what I’d take from this week. Not a prediction. A plan that works on both sides of the coin flip.

Jake’s Workbench

Big product week while I was away:

The Score to Price Map shipped. The question I get most is “so what price would a CSH Score of 20 be?” The app now shows the live BTC price range for every score band. Today’s answer: the 20s start about 9% below current price.
CSV trade imports are close. Soon you’ll drop your exchange export on the app and it will match trades to your plan automatically, no hand-logging. Tom’s been testing it on our own accounts.

All on the same free app linked below. Founding access for the first 100 opens later this year.

Create your CSH account today

Quick Hits

Roughly US$2.7 billion of crypto shorts were liquidated in 24 hours on August 19 per Coinglass data, reported by Bloomberg as the largest short liquidation on record. The squeeze, not fresh buying, did a lot of this week’s lifting.
The reported spark: the US Treasury said it will at least double its long-end buyback operations from US$2 billion to at least US$4 billion each.
The squeeze kept running: about another US$1 billion of shorts were wiped on August 21 as Bitcoin cleared $75,000 (CoinDesk).

The Week Ahead

The follow-through is the story now. In every past case, you couldn’t tell a real bottom from a fake-out on the pump week itself. The difference showed up over the following weeks, in whether the CSH Score held above 30 and kept climbing. 31.9 is the number to watch.
Weekly closes against the bull market resistance band, the 20-week and 21-week moving averages, currently sitting around $69,400 to $69,600 (Bitstamp weekly data). This week closed about $7K above it. The catch: April and May closed above the same band too, then rolled over, which is why my rule asks for consecutive closes, not one. Worth noticing: the band sits almost exactly where the CSH Score’s 20s band tops out.
September is historically a weak month for Bitcoin. If it lives up to that this year, the CSH Score’s 20s band starts at $69,632, about 9% below Sunday’s price. That’s where historically cheap begins again.

The Close

Back to the fishing trip, because it’s the whole argument in one story.

I had no reception for the biggest week of the year, and it cost me nothing. My plan has been buying since February, through 79 straight days of CSH Score readings in the 20s, when it was boring and nobody wanted to talk about Bitcoin. The position was already built. This week just changed the number next to it.

I didn’t earn that by watching charts. I earned it months ago, when I wrote the plan and let it run.

The market will serve up more weeks like this one. The best time to decide what you’ll do in them is now, while it’s calm.

— Jake

74 Days of Sitting Tight

Jake Pahor — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 09:04:41 GMT

Crypto Super Hub — The CSH Weekly Brief | August 16, 2026

Tomorrow, Bitcoin ties a record almost nobody is watching.

The CSH Score has now spent 74 straight days in the 20 to 30 band, the zone we call accumulation territory. One more day ties the longest run in the score’s 14-year history. Two more breaks it. No crash, no breakout, no headlines. Price has been stuck between roughly $59,000 and $66,500 for two and a half months, the longest stretch of nothing this market has ever produced.

Most people treat a market like this as a reason to switch off. I did the opposite. I spent the week with a trading book written in 1923, about a trader born in 1877, and it turns out to explain this exact stretch, and about half the people in your feed, better than anything published this year.

It also handed me the only sentence you need for the next few months. More below.

Everything in this issue runs on the free version of the app:

Create your free CSH account

The CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score: 24.7/100 — Early Cycle (−0.7 on the week). Bottom 21% of every reading since 2011, and day 74 of the unbroken run between 20 and 30.

Key indicators:

BTC: US$63,066 / A$89,098 (7d: −2.76%)
BTC Dominance: 58.91%
ETH/BTC: 0.0298
TOTAL3/BTC (alts priced in Bitcoin): 0.37, flat on the week
200-week moving average: ~US$63,900. Price is now about 1.4% below it
Bull market support band: ~US$68,800 to US$69,100 overhead

Callback: Last issue I showed you what a perfect bottom call was worth: 24% over a plain banded plan, and every realistic alternative 49 to 71 per cent behind it. This week the market tested the other half of that argument. Nothing happened. For 74 days, mostly nothing has happened. That’s the part no backtest can teach you, because the hard bit of a plan isn’t the maths. It’s the sitting.

Jake’s read: the squeeze I described last week is resolving, and not upward. Price is sitting about 1.4% under the 200-week moving average, and if it stays here we get a weekly close below it right as we enter August and September, historically Bitcoin’s two weakest months. Meanwhile the S&P 500 closed at another record this week and gold is near all-time highs. Stocks at records with Bitcoin 49.5% off its high is not a combination I’d lean bullish into. Our base case is unchanged: weakness into September or October, roughly 80% of the way through this bear on time, and watching for the first CSH Score reading under 20, which still hasn’t printed. My scheduled buys keep running either way. Not advice, just what my plan is doing.

Be right, sit tight

The best thing I read this year was written 103 years ago.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is a lightly fictionalised account of Jesse Livermore, who started trading in Boston bucket shops at fifteen and made his first million shorting the panic of 1907, a million of it in a single day. He also went broke more than once getting there. The man failed more times than most people ever try.

One passage has stuck with me all week. An old trader the customers called Old Turkey gets pestered for tips, and every time someone tells him to take profits before a dip, he gives the same answer: he can’t, because he’d lose his position, and the big money was never in the wiggles. It was in the main move. Sizing up the whole market and its trend, then not letting go.

Livermore’s own words on it:

“It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! ... Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon.”

And the line I’d frame on the wall of every crypto account on X:

“The market does not beat them. They beat themselves, because though they have brains they cannot sit tight.”

Be right, sit tight. Two separate jobs.

Being right is the work you do on a calm day. Read the conditions, form a view only you can own, write the plan down. That’s what the CSH Score and the Plan Builder are for: the score tells you where Bitcoin sits in its cycle, the plan decides in advance what you’ll do about it. Right now the score reads 24.7, the bottom 21% of every reading since 2011. My view, which I’ve held for months: cheap, probably not the low, accumulation territory on a plan.

Sitting tight is the harder job, and it points in different directions depending on the market. In a bull market it means letting the position run past every urge to take a tidy profit. Livermore again: “you never grow poor taking profits. No, you don’t. But neither do you grow rich taking a four-point profit in a bull market.” In a bear it means the opposite: patience while the conditions grind through the boring part. This bear has been the boring part for 74 straight days.

Here’s what the score’s own history says about runs like this one. The four longest stretches in the 20 to 30 band before now: 75 days ending December 2016, 66 ending October 2023, 62 ending January 2016, 57 ending August 2022. Three of those four resolved upward into accumulation that paid. The 2022 one broke down into the November low.

But the detail that matters is one layer deeper. Of those four, only the 2022 run happened in the middle of a bear market, before the low was in. The 2016 and 2023 runs all came after their bears had already bottomed, when quiet really was accumulation. The one streak that looked most like today’s, mid-bear with hope still in the market, is the one that broke down.

That’s not a prediction. It’s a reason to respect both outcomes, and it’s why the plan covers both: scheduled buys the whole way through, bigger tiers locked and waiting for a sub-20 reading that might never come, and exactly what they’re there for if the record streak resolves the 2022 way.

One more thing from the book that made me laugh out loud. Livermore describes the “semisucker” as the bloke who “knows all the don’ts that ever fell from the oracular lips of the old stagers, excepting the principal one, which is: Don’t be a sucker!” He’s also the type who “thinks he has cut his wisdom teeth because he loves to buy on declines.” Written in 1923. He’d have a field day with crypto Twitter.

There is nothing new in markets. There can’t be, because speculation is as old as the hills, and human nature hasn’t changed since.

Jake’s Workbench

I automated myself out of a job this month. The boring half of it, anyway.

Every Sunday for the past year I’ve sat down and manually pulled the week’s numbers: X analytics, LinkedIn, the newsletter stats, all of it into one review. Thirty-plus minutes, every week, and me doing it added exactly nothing. So I set up Claude to do the whole pull automatically on Sunday mornings and log the report before I’m out of bed. It even drives the browser itself for the parts that don’t have an export. Slowly, mind you. But it doesn’t make mistakes, and it doesn’t need me watching.

The reason I’m telling you this isn’t the tool. It’s the principle, and it’s the same principle as the score. Automate the repeatable decisions so your energy goes to the ones that actually need you. That’s all the CSH system is: the data pull is automated, the plan executes by rules you set in advance, and the only job left for you is the one that matters, deciding what kind of investor you want to be on a calm day.

Tom’s SMSF plan goes public on X this week too. Short version: he’s set it deliberately aggressive, deploying only between a CSH Score of 10 and 20, scaling up as it falls. That zone hasn’t printed once this bear, so his plan has sat in cash all year, exactly as written. Sitting tight isn’t only a holding skill. The Plan Builder he used is free.

Create your free CSH account

Quick Hits

The scams are getting worse, not better, and they’re coming for super. Two weeks after I wrote about SMSF savings lost to a fake yield platform, I watched more of it cross the desk this week, including six-figure USDT purchases headed for external wallets with all the classic red flags attached. We caught one before the money left. The industry only ever sees the ones that get caught. So what: the number one rule in crypto hasn’t changed and never will. Never send funds to a wallet you don’t control, and treat every promised return as the opening line of a theft. For scale: boring spot Bitcoin, bought on any of the 325 cheap days in 2022 and 2023 and just held, returned between 4.2x and 7.9x at the 2025 top. Nobody offering you “guaranteed 20%” can compete with that, and they were never planning to pay you anyway.
The S&P 500 set another record while Bitcoin sat 49.5% below its own. US stocks made fresh all-time highs this week on cooling inflation data, gold is near records at about US$4,376, and Bitcoin went sideways again. So what: that divergence won’t hold forever, and I don’t know which side closes the gap. My plan doesn’t need to know. It’s also worth saying plainly: risk assets at records while rate expectations wobble is late-innings behaviour, which is one more reason we’re not in a hurry.
Watch tomorrow morning’s weekly close. Price is sitting about 1.4% below the 200-week moving average, roughly US$63,900. Bitcoin has closed a week below that line exactly once this cycle, at the end of June, and it snapped straight back. A second close below it, heading into the historically weak August-September window, would confirm the market is still working through the down leg. So what: no action from me either way. The levels are context. The score is the input, and it reads 24.7.

The Week Ahead

Tuesday: the record. If the CSH Score holds between 20 and 30 through Tuesday, this becomes the longest stretch in that band in the score’s history, past the 75-day run from late 2016. I’ll post what that has meant historically, both the times it resolved up and the time it didn’t.
Monday 10am AEST: the weekly candle closes. Above or below US$63,900. See Quick Hits.
Thursday: this week’s article. Be Right, Sit Tight: the full Livermore piece, what a 1923 book gets right about 2026, and how we’ve built the sitting into a system so you don’t have to be a once-a-century freak to manage it.
Quiet macro week. The next big scheduled prints are US CPI September 11 and the Fed decision September 16. Three Fed officials voted for a hike in July. September is where that argument gets settled.

The Close

Livermore made and lost four fortunes, and the thing he said mattered most wasn’t a trade. It was sitting still when he was right.

This market is a 74-day test of exactly that. Most people fail it quietly: they don’t sell the bottom, they just stop buying, stop looking, drift off to whatever’s moving. The plan is what sits tight for you.

Be right on a calm day. Then let the system do the sitting.

— Jake

Nothing in this email is financial advice. The CSH Score is a measurement, not a signal, and past cycles don’t guarantee anything about this one.

One word back: are you still buying this bear, yes or no?

Bitcoin's Been Cheap for 129 Days

Jake Pahor — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 09:07:25 GMT

Crypto Super Hub — The CSH Weekly Brief | August 9, 2026

Everyone is waiting for the window to open.

It opened in February.

Bitcoin has been cheap for 129 days now and almost nobody noticed, because cheap didn’t arrive the way people expect. No crash. No capitulation candle. No moment where it was obvious. The CSH Score just dropped under 30, which is our line for cheap by cycle standards, one Monday in February. It’s mostly stayed there since.

That’s the problem with waiting for a signal you’ll recognise. It might not arrive.

Everything below runs on the free version of the app:

Create your free CSH account

The CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score: 25.4/100 — Early Cycle (+0.6 on the week). Bottom 22% of every reading since 2011, and the 67th day in a row with the score between 20 and 30.

Key indicators:

BTC: US$64,753 / A$92,760 (7d: +2.00%)
BTC Dominance: 59.35%
ETH/BTC: 0.0295
TOTAL3/BTC (alts priced in Bitcoin): 0.37, flat on the week
200-week moving average: ~US$63,780
Bull market support band: ~US$69,200 to US$69,330

Callback: Last issue I asked how you hold most of your stack. Self-custody won easily, and after the month we’ve just had that answer needs more detail, because self-custody on its own isn’t a plan.

Four things I’d take out of the last fortnight:

Spread it. Don’t hold everything on one device. This month proved the device can be the weak point.
Use multisig for anything you’d be sick about losing. Two or three keys held in different places means one compromised seed isn’t the end of it.
A licensed exchange account is a legitimate part of the mix, not a compromise, if it has two-factor authentication, a dedicated email address you don’t use anywhere else, and audited proof of reserves you can go and check yourself.
Write down what happens if you get hit by a bus. Nobody does this, and it’s the part that actually loses coins.

Jake’s read: July closed positive. Our base case from here is a weak August and September. Price is squeezing between two lines, the 200-week average underneath at about US$63,780 and the bull market support band above at roughly US$69,200, and they’re converging. That squeeze resolves one way or the other before long, and we’re leaning down. On timing, we think we’re around 80% of the way through this bear.

What the bottom is actually worth

Every bear before this one made you wait most of a year to get cheap. Counting from the top to the first day the CSH Score dropped under 30: 258 days after the 2013 top, 339 after 2017, 218 after 2021.

This one took 125 days.

Cheap turned up in February around US$70,500 and never left. We’re now 129 days with a CSH Score under 30, 44 of those under 25, and not one reading under 20.

Which brings me to the question I get asked more than any other. When’s the bottom, and how do I know when to buy?

I can’t answer that. Nobody can. So I backtested it instead.

Five execution models, $100,000 each, run against our score history through the last complete bear and measured at the October 2025 top. I used $100,000 because it’s roughly the rollover size I keep hearing about, not because it’s a number I’m recommending.

Bought the exact bottom, 10 November 2022: 6.35 BTC
Followed the CSH Score, buying bigger as it fell: 5.12 BTC
Same amount every week, the whole way through: 2.62 BTC
Waited until it felt safe, February 2024: 1.92 BTC
Waited for a new all-time high to confirm it, March 2024: 1.47 BTC

Two things stand out.

The first: buying the exact bottom, which needs a crystal ball, got you 24% more Bitcoin than just following the score. So a perfect call was worth 24%. That’s it.

The second is the gap underneath. Every other model finished 49% to 71% behind the plan. And none of those are stupid decisions. They’re what careful people actually do.

Waiting until it felt safe finished with 63% less Bitcoin. February 2024 genuinely did feel safe. The ETFs had launched, price was climbing, the news had turned. That’s the problem. It felt safe because it had already got expensive.

Everyone worries about buying too early. Waiting is what actually costs you.

The CSH Score doesn’t fix that by being clever about the bottom. It fixes it by making the decision on the days you’d talk yourself out of one, and by sizing each buy to the score instead of betting it all on a single day. Small when it’s only mildly cheap, bigger as it gets cheaper, biggest at levels that barely ever print. So if the bottom does turn up, you’re buying into it instead of watching it.

That’s not perfect and I won’t pretend it is. Nobody gets 6.35 BTC without a crystal ball. It’s just a long way better than what people actually do.

Now the part that cuts against me. Holding out for a very low score did work. In that bear, buying only the days with a CSH Score under 20 got an average entry 18.7% cheaper than buying every day under 30. In the 2018 bear it was 29.8% cheaper. Patience paid.

The catch is how short that window was. In 2018 the score spent 60 days under 20, total. Miss it and you deployed nothing, which is how you end up in the 1.47 BTC row.

So my plan does both. Scheduled buys run the whole time the CSH Score is under 30, so I’m always accumulating. The bigger tiers stay locked until a reading under 20 that might never come. If it never comes, I’ve still spent 129 days buying under 30.

For what it’s worth, today’s US$64,753 is 1.9% below the average price of all 129 of those days.

Jake’s Workbench

Tom has set up his SMSF, and he’s going to deploy six figures of his own money into Bitcoin through it, in public.

We’ll show all of it. How the plan was built, which score bands he’s targeting, what each tier is sized at, and what actually fires. Not a backtest this time, and not a case study written up once we already know how it went. His real fund, his real money, posted as it happens.

Plenty of people will tell you what to buy. Very few show you their own execution while the outcome is still unknown, because that’s the part where you can be wrong in front of everyone.

More on Tom’s plan over the coming weeks. The Plan Builder he used is free.

Quick Hits

The Coldcard theft is bigger than the early numbers, and the scammers have followed the fear. Analysts now put the total near 1,816 BTC, roughly US$116 million, from more than 5,200 addresses across four waves. A week ago the tally was 1,367. And a second wave has started with nothing to do with the original flaw: on August 6 a Trezor user reported losing their life savings after clicking a sponsored Google result that led to a fake Trezor page hosted on Google Sites. Trezor confirmed the page and said it was escalating internally. Their hardware was never compromised. So what: the attack moved from the device to the search bar. Bookmark your wallet site or type the address in yourself. A paid ad slot is not a trust signal.
The market is climbing a wall of worry. The S&P closed at a record on Friday, up 3.58% on the week, while three Fed officials voted to raise rates in July, the most hawkish split on that committee in nearly a decade, and US government debt keeps making highs. Gold is up 2.39% and near records too, which isn’t a combination you see in a calm market. So what: stocks at records with Bitcoin still 48% off its high won’t stay unusual forever. I don’t know which moves toward the other. My plan doesn’t need to know.
Bitcoin ETF flows turned back on, for now. Spot Bitcoin ETFs took inflows on five straight days from August 3 to 7, more than US$750 million for the week, with BlackRock’s fund taking US$479 million of the first US$626 million. Against the backdrop: those same funds ran US$5.4 billion of net outflows across the first half of 2026, their first negative half-year since launch. So what: ETF flows are the one demand signal that isn’t sentiment. One good week doesn’t reverse a bad half, but it’s the first thing in months that looks like buyers rather than sellers.

The Week Ahead

US CPI on Wednesday August 12, PPI on Thursday. July inflation, 8:30am New York time, which is Thursday morning here. These two set the tone into the September 16 Fed meeting. A hot number is the more likely source of trouble.
The squeeze. The 200-week average at about US$63,780 and the bull market support band around US$69,200 are converging, with price caught between them. Weekly closes either side of that range are the only levels I’m watching.
A CSH Score under 20. It hasn’t happened once this bear: 129 days under 30, zero under 20. My biggest tiers stay locked until that changes, and if it lands it’ll be in this dashboard before it’s anywhere else.
Getting ready is the actual work. If a low score lands while your money is still in a super fund, your SMSF isn’t registered, or your bank hasn’t been tested with a small transfer, the window closes while you’re doing paperwork. Cash where you can spend it, structure done, rails tested, plan written. Ready before cheap.

The people who did well out of the last bear weren’t the ones who guessed right. Most of them never guessed at all. They’d already decided what they’d do, then did it on the days it felt worst.

It isn’t clever and it doesn’t make for good content. It just works more often than the alternative.

The score and Plan Builder are free:

Create your free CSH account

One number this week, and it’s the only thing I want to know: on a scale of 1 to 4, how ready are you right now? 1 is nothing done, 4 is cash in the account and a plan written. Reply with the digit.

See you next Sunday.

Jake

Not financial advice. This is a record of what I do with my own money and why. History doesn’t guarantee a repeat. Talk to someone licensed who knows your situation before moving real dollars.

Luna Promised Me 20% Too

Jake Pahor — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:07:07 GMT

Crypto Super Hub — The CSH Weekly Brief | August 2, 2026

This week we noticed several SMSFs, unconnected to each other on paper, all withdrawing stablecoins to the same wallet address.

Different funds. Different trustees. One address. In super, that’s not just strange, it’s against the rules. Your fund’s crypto has to be held in the fund’s own name. It can never be pooled with another fund, another person, another platform.

So we pulled the thread. Behind that address: an offshore platform promising 20% annual returns, guaranteed. Reviews that all sound like the same person wrote them. No SMSF accounts. No names, no license, no way to find out who’s actually holding the money.

I’ve taken enough of these calls to know how this ends, and it makes me angrier every time, because it’s always someone’s retirement. This issue is the one I hope you forward to the person who needs it.

Everything I use to stay on the boring path runs on the free version of the app.

Create your free CSH account

The CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score: 24.8/100 — Early Cycle (−0.8 on the week). Bottom 21% of every reading since 2011, and roughly the 60th straight day inside the 20–30 band.

Key indicators:

BTC: US$62,948 / A$89,745 (7d: −3.6%)
BTC Dominance: 59.0%
ETH/BTC: 0.0295
TOTAL3/BTC (alts priced in Bitcoin): 0.37 — prior cycle bottoms washed out near 0.25
Fear & Greed: 27 — Fear
Total market cap: ~US$2.14T

Callback: Last issue I asked for one number: the percentage of your stack that’s Bitcoin. Only a handful of you replied, but the answers were telling. Most of you are 100% Bitcoin. A couple are holding ETH and waiting for its turn. One of you is running a full altcoin playbook. That last group is why I don’t think this reset is finished: there’s still hope in the market, and bears usually grind that out before they end. And the three things I said needed to happen before this bear could finish (issue #24)? Still zero of three.

Jake’s read: July closed positive, then the tape slipped back under the 200-week average (~US$63.5K). Reclaiming that line is the whole fight right now, and fear is picking up outside crypto too. My plan did nothing this week, on schedule.

What the scam looked like from my side of the desk

It starts innocently. Someone sets up an SMSF, opens the account, transfers super, buys crypto. Sensible questions, careful people. Sometimes the pitch comes later, once there’s a balance worth stealing, from a “platform” a friend or a Facebook group swears by. And sometimes it’s worse: the scammer is there from day one, coaching the whole setup, the fund, the bank account, the exchange account, playing the part of the helpful expert while steering every dollar toward a wallet they control. I’ve taken calls where you can tell the person is being fed their next question over WhatsApp in real time.

The pattern is close to identical every time. Guaranteed returns, this one was 20% a year. Offshore, so no Australian license and no regulator to complain to. Glowing reviews that read like they came off a production line. And at some point, an instruction to send funds to a wallet address that isn’t yours.

That last one is the deal-breaker, and the rule could not be simpler: your fund’s crypto is held in the fund’s name, always. A wallet the fund controls is fine. The fund’s account at a licensed Australian exchange is fine. A stranger’s “platform wallet”, pooled with other people’s money, is neither, and no legitimate operator will ever ask you to send coins to one. The moment your coins land in an address like that, they aren’t yours anymore, and usually that’s the last you see of them.

Here’s the five-minute check I’d run on any platform before a dollar moves. Is the return guaranteed? Real crypto yield is variable and mostly boring; guaranteed means the return is being paid out of the next person’s deposit. Can you find the humans? A registered Australian entity, named directors, an AUSTRAC registration you can look up. Do the reviews survive a sniff test? And does your money ever leave custody in your fund's name? Any single miss and I walk. Two misses and it’s a scam, ten times out of ten.

And before anyone feels stupid for being tempted, I’ll put my own hand up. In 2022 I had money earning a “guaranteed” 19.5% in Anchor, the savings product built on Luna. It had slick dashboards, institutional backers and millions of true believers, and in May it went to zero in about a week, along with roughly $40 billion of other people’s money. So I’m not writing this from a high horse. I’m writing it as someone who knows exactly how reasonable that pitch sounds, and exactly how it ends.

When it goes wrong, there’s no fixing it. Prosecution of these platforms is close to zero. Tracing is hard and recovery almost never happens. I’ve watched people lose six figures of super this way, and those funds do not come back. Ever.

And the part that makes me angriest: nobody needed the 20%.

I went through our score history this week to put a number on it. Bitcoin from the November 2022 low to the October 2025 top did 7.9x. But forget catching the low. Across 2022 and 2023 there were 325 days where the score sat under 30, meaning Bitcoin was cheap by cycle standards. Buy on the single worst of those days, $30,019, and you were still up 4.2x at the top. The median of all 325 did 6x.

Read that again next time someone pitches you a guaranteed 20%. The most boring possible entry into Bitcoin, the bluechip of this entire asset class, quadrupled, with no counterparty who can disappear, no lock-up, no bloke on WhatsApp. History doesn’t guarantee a repeat. But if it sounds too good to be true, it is. Every single time.

Jake’s Workbench

Quiet week on the surface. Underneath, it’s all launch prep: the paid version opens to a founding 100, and that cap is a real number, not a marketing device. Those spots go to people already using the free version.

The plan itself did what plans do. Scheduled buys running inside my range, bigger tiers still waiting on a sub-20 print that hasn’t come, no decisions made by me in real time.

Everything above is free to try right now, including the score and Plan Builder.

Quick Hits

The Coldcard exploit keeps growing. A flaw in how Coldcard wallets generated seed phrases let attackers recreate seeds offline and sweep wallets without ever touching a device. Since July 30, close to US$89 million in Bitcoin has been drained from more than 4,500 addresses across three separate waves, and the latest wave went after small wallets, around 0.1 BTC per victim, so being small is no protection. Who’s affected, per CoinKite’s official advisory: Mk2 and Mk3 devices on firmware 4.0.1 to 4.1.9 are the severe cases, and seeds generated on Mk4, Mk5 or Q before the fixed firmware releases are affected too, less severely but seriously enough that CoinKite recommends migrating. Ledger, Trezor, Bitkey and Jade are unaffected. Seeds created with 50 or more dice rolls aren’t at risk from this bug, and a passphrase buys time but doesn’t repair the seed. The guidance is blunt: update the firmware, generate a fresh seed, and move your funds. CoinKite’s advisory is here, and Checkonchain’s write-up is the best plain-English breakdown. So what: “just self-custody it” has been the industry’s default advice for years, and this week it was proven incomplete. The real rule for SMSFs is that the fund’s crypto is held in the fund’s name, whether that’s the fund’s own wallet or a licensed Australian exchange, and whichever model you run, custody is part of running the fund, same as the audit. As an industry we owe people better answers than a slogan.
Risk-off is spreading. SpaceX has fallen below its IPO price and sits roughly half off its post-IPO high. The 2-year Treasury yield has pushed to 2026 highs as bond markets start pricing the chance of rate rises. And while the Fed held rates in July, three of its own members voted to raise them instead, the most hawkish split on the committee in nearly a decade. So what: fear outside crypto tends to leak in. My plan doesn’t trade headlines, but it does expect them.
August and September are historically Bitcoin’s two worst months, the only two with negative average returns, and in all three prior midterm years (2014, 2018, 2022) both months closed red. So what: if red months come, the calendar doesn’t size my buys. The score does.

The Week Ahead

The clock. The last three bears ran 410, 363 and 365 days from top to bottom, and two of the three bottomed almost exactly one year after the top. This one is on day 299, and day 365 lands on October 7. A clock, not a prediction.
The sub-20 window. In every prior bear, the first sub-20 score printed 236 to 352 days after the top. We’re inside that window right now with zero prints, and September, October and December hold the most sub-20 days in 14.5 years of history. That print is the trigger my bigger tiers are waiting on. If it lands, you’ll hear it here first.

The 200-week line, ~US$63.5K. Price is sitting just beneath it. Weekly closes either side are the tape’s whole story.

The people who get caught by these platforms aren’t stupid or greedy. They’re mostly careful people who were sold certainty in an asset class that doesn’t have any. The honest version is slower: a system, a score, buys sized on a calm day, custody in your fund’s name.

That’s what we build. The score and Plan Builder are free:

Create your free CSH account

One-word reply this week, and after the week I’ve had I’m genuinely asking: how do you hold most of your stack? Self-custody, exchange, or ETF.

See you next Sunday.

Jake

Not financial advice. This is a record of what I do with my own money and why. Past cycles don’t promise anything about this one. Scam warnings here are general in nature. Talk to someone licensed who knows your situation before moving real dollars.

$64K and I'm Only Buying Bitcoin

Jake Pahor — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:04:25 GMT

Crypto Super Hub — The CSH Weekly Brief | July 26, 2026

Every SMSF call I take ends the same way.

We get through the paperwork. Trust deed, bank account, custody, audit trail. All the stuff that keeps people out of trouble. Then there’s a pause, and I know exactly what’s coming.

“So. Should I buy now? Should I wait? What do I actually buy?”

I can’t answer that. Not won’t. Can’t. The person asking might be 42 with twenty years of runway, or 68 with three. They might sleep fine through a 30% drawdown or lose their mind at 10%. Nobody can answer that question for someone else, and anyone who does is guessing.

But hundreds of people have asked me it now, and it’s the reason Tom and I built CSH. So this week I’m giving the only honest answer I’ve got: exactly what I do with my own money, and the system that runs it. Not so you copy it. So you can see what a system looks like, and build your own.

Everything below runs on the free version of the app.

Create your free CSH account

The CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score: 25.6/100 — Early Cycle (steady, +0.7 on the week). Bottom 22% of every reading since 2011, and the 52nd straight day inside the 20–30 band.

Key indicators:

BTC: US$64,492 / A$91,717 (7d: roughly flat)
BTC Dominance: 59.2%
ETH/BTC: 0.029
TOTAL3/BTC (alts priced in Bitcoin): 0.37 — prior cycle bottoms washed out near 0.25
Fear & Greed: 26 - Fear
Total market cap: $2.27T

Callback: Last issue I said three things had to happen before this bear could end, and that none had. A week on, the count is still zero for three. The only change worth noting: BTC clawed back above its 200-week average (~US$63.3K). Necessary, nowhere near sufficient.

Jake’s read: A fortnight of sideways chop between roughly US$62K and $66K, with the score parked in the mid-20s the whole time. Boring tape, loud macro. My plan changed nothing this week, and that was the plan.

How I invest my own money

No headline this week. The question above matters more than anything in the news cycle, so here’s my answer, in three rules.

Rule one: measure against two benchmarks. I track my portfolio in dollars and in Bitcoin. The second number keeps me honest. If your alts doubled while Bitcoin tripled, you went backwards. You just didn’t notice, because you were only watching the dollar number. Fifteen years in, BTC is still the benchmark of this whole asset class. If I’m going to hold anything else, it’s because I genuinely think it’ll beat Bitcoin. Otherwise, why hold it?

Rule two: core first, and know your limits. Right now I’m 100% Bitcoin. Zero altcoins. That’s not forever, it’s just what fits my life. I’ve got a family, a full-time job at an exchange, and I’m building CSH on the side. Altcoin rotation is a job for someone with hours I don’t have. I know because I tried it last cycle, with a bag of alts and no plan, and got rekt while Bitcoin quietly beat almost everything I was holding. The lesson wasn’t that altcoins are bad. It was that my portfolio has to fit my actual life. Start with BTC as the core. Add complexity only if you’ve got the time and skill to carry it.

Rule three: let the system do the buying. My money runs on a dynamic DCA through the CSH score. Buys on a schedule, but only while the score sits inside my range of 10 to 30. The sizing is the dynamic part: the lower the score, the bigger the buy. A parcel at 30 is modest. A parcel at 15 is several times larger. Every one of those decisions was made months ago, on a calm day. The market can’t renegotiate with me at 11pm.

And the same machinery runs in reverse. My plan DCAs out above my exit band. Last cycle, having exits written down was the difference between banking the cycle and round-tripping it. Bitcoin has kept to something very close to a four-year rhythm its whole life. I’m not fading that with vibes.

Where does that leave me this week? Score at 25.6, scheduled buys running inside the band, bigger tiers still waiting for a sub-20 print that hasn’t come. Two weeks of doing nothing new on purpose. Inaction is also a position, and right now it’s mine.

Jake’s Workbench

Big ship this week: My Plans got a full overhaul. Email alerts are live. You can set a portfolio goal and watch it fill. Order logging is two taps, and the portfolio view now shows your average buy price next to the live score. It’s turning into the screen I check instead of the price.

Here’s my own plan, straight from the app:

Three orders logged since late June, 0.2279 BTC toward a 2 BTC goal, average buy A$87,755. Quick caveat so nobody misreads that screen: this plan only tracks what I’ve bought since it went live a few weeks ago. It’s a slice of my stack, not the whole thing. But that’s the system from the section above, running in public, and the record builds from here.

Next on the bench: CSV upload and exchange sync, so order logging gets even easier.

Quick Hits

Altseason chatter is back. My feed’s full of rotation calls. The dial I watch says not yet: alt market cap priced in BTC sits at 0.37, and every prior cycle bottom washed down near 0.25 before alts had their run. Dominance still rising, ETH/BTC still flat. So what: if you’re being pitched an alt rotation this week, ask what benchmark the pitch is measured in.

(TOTAL3 - USDT)/ BTC - Trading View

The Fed meets Wednesday (US time). A hold is priced at roughly 85%, but hike whispers are getting louder. So what: unless your plan depends on next month’s rates, this is noise. Mine doesn’t.
Visa launched a stablecoin platform so banks can issue their own coins without building the plumbing. So what: this is what bear markets are for. The rails get built while nobody’s watching the price.
Morgan Stanley switched on spot BTC, ETH and SOL trading for E*TRADE customers. So what: millions of ordinary brokerage accounts are now one tap from Bitcoin. The next wave of buyers won’t come through crypto Twitter. They’ll come through screens they already use.

The Week Ahead

FOMC decision, Thursday 4am AEST. A hold is mostly priced, so the reaction will be about the language. Expect chop either direction. Chop is not a signal.
The 200-week average, ~US$63.3K. BTC is sitting almost exactly on it. Weekly closes above or below this line are what the whole market is watching.
The sub-20 print. Still zero days below 20 this cycle. That’s the trigger my bigger buy tiers are waiting on. If it arrives, you’ll hear about it here first.

One question built this whole company: “should I buy now?” The honest answer was never a date or a coin. It’s a system that fits your life, sized to your nerves, written down before the market gets loud.

Mine’s above. If you want to build yours, the score and Plan Builder are free:

Create your free CSH account

And I’m curious about the room: hit reply with one number, the percentage of your stack that’s Bitcoin right now. I’ll share the spread next week.

See you then.

Jake

3 Things Have to Happen First

Jake Pahor — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 09:06:08 GMT

Crypto Super Hub — The Weekly Brief | 19 July 2026

The loudest week of doing nothing

My feed spent the whole week calling the bottom. Confident threads, victory laps, “you had your chance” posts.

Meanwhile I did nothing. Not a single discretionary move. My weekly buy fired on schedule, the way it has every week this year, and the bigger orders in my plan stayed exactly where they’ve been for months: loaded, waiting, untriggered.

Two weeks of Bitcoin grinding sideways in the low $60Ks will do strange things to people. Some snap and sell. Some declare the bottom, because being early feels like being smart. In 2021 I was the second kind. The grind cost me more than any crash did, because boredom is when you start improvising.

So this week I went looking for an actual answer. Not vibes, not someone else’s chart. I pulled our full score history, every day since February 2012, and asked one question: what did every previous bear market do before it ended, and has this one done it?

The answer is the cleanest thing I’ve seen all year.

The CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score: 24.9 / 100, up 0.8 on the week (+3.3%), sitting in the 20 to 30 band. Bitcoin has only spent 15.1% of its history down here. Today’s reading is in the bottom 21% of every score we’ve ever printed.

The numbers that matter this week:

BTC price: $64,739 (7d: +1.55%)
Cycle low so far: score 21.5 on July 1, at $58,551
The 200-week moving average sits near $63K. Price is trading right on top of it.
Days this year with the score under 30: 107 of the first 199
Days this cycle with the score under 20: zero

Jake’s read: the score says accumulation territory, but price is stuck in a shrinking wedge. Long-term support underneath, the old bull market support band pressing down from above. Squeezes like this end with a break, one way or the other. My plan doesn’t need to guess which way. Standard buys keep running at these levels, and the aggressive tiers stay parked until the score does something it hasn’t done all cycle. More on that in a second.

See the live score

The checklist this bear hasn’t run

Since 2014, every Bitcoin bear market has done three specific things before it ended. Not sometimes. Every time.

1. It took its time. The modern bears all ran roughly twelve months from top to bottom. This one topped in October 2025. Twelve months puts the window in the fourth quarter of this year. We’re in month nine.

2. It pushed the score under 20. This is the one that stopped me. The 2014-15 bear spent 275 days with the score under 20. The 2018 bear spent 52 days there. The 2022 bear, 123 days. This cycle so far: not a single day. The closest we’ve come is 21.5, on July 1.

3. It got cheaper than the average buyer’s cost. There’s an on-chain number called the realised price: the average price at which every Bitcoin last changed hands. Think of it as the market’s collective break-even, currently around $53K. In every previous bear, price fell through that level before the bottom was in. June’s low of $57K got close. It never touched it.

Three checkpoints. Zero completed. That’s why I’m not in the bottom-is-in camp, however much I’d like to be.

Now the honest other side, because there is one. This drawdown has been shallower than past bears at the same stage. The ETFs are a class of buyer that simply didn’t exist in 2018 or 2022, and they may put a higher floor under this cycle than history suggests. And at the June low, more Bitcoin was underwater than in profit for the first time this cycle, a condition that has historically shown up in the same neighbourhood as bottoms. A reasonable person could weigh all that and conclude the low is closer than my checklist implies.

Here’s the part that actually matters for your money: I don’t need to win that argument, and neither do you. If the bottom is in, my weekly buys at scores in the low 20s will look very good. If it isn’t, my bigger orders are waiting below 20 with cash ready. The plan covers both branches. A prediction only covers one.

Jake’s Workbench

I put Claude to work on our score history this week. 5,279 days of data, one question: if you’d bought Bitcoin on any given day, what was that purchase worth 12 months later, grouped by what the score read on the day you bought?

The results, in plain English. Bought anywhere in the 20 to 30 band, where we are today, the median outcome a year later was +132%, and only 6% of those days ended the year negative. Bought above a score of 60, the median outcome was a loss.

Read that again slowly, because it’s the whole philosophy in one chart. The edge doesn’t come from catching the exact low. Buyers in the “pretty cheap” band did about as well as buyers in the “screaming cheap” band. The edge comes from refusing to buy euphoria and being systematically present near the floor. Fifteen years of data, one sentence.

Past readings, not a promise. But it’s exactly why the plan exists.

Also on the bench this week: we’re tuning the score engine for ETH, SOL and XRP (close, but numbers don’t ship until the forward-sims stop surprising us), and we’re debating exchange API sync versus CSV upload for portfolio tracking. If you have a view on that one, reply to this email. I read everything.

And if you haven’t built your plan yet, this stretch of the cycle is exactly what the Plan Builder is for. Build it while the market is boring. Execute it when it isn’t.

Create your free plan

Quick hits

One Bitcoin now buys about 16 ounces of gold. At the October top it bought roughly double that, and the June dip touched 14. Gold is only ~19% off its January record while BTC ground lower, which makes this Bitcoin’s cheapest stretch against gold since 2023. Two “fear assets,” two very different years.
The Fed held at 3.50 to 3.75% and dropped its easing bias. June inflation came in cooler than expected, yet markets now price September as a coin flip and lean toward a hike by December. Tight money into a bear market’s final quarter is a headwind worth respecting.
Spot ETF holdings have rolled over, slipping back below 1.25M BTC after peaking in late 2025. The buyer that absorbed everyone’s selling on the way up has gone quiet. Whether it comes back before Q4 is one of the bigger questions in this market.
August and September have been red in every midterm election year on record (2014, 2018, 2022), with August the worst of the pair. Seasonality isn’t destiny. But if the next two months get ugly, nobody here will be surprised.

One Bitcoin bought 31 ounces of gold in October. Today it buys 16.

The week ahead

The 200-week moving average, ~$63K. Price is sitting on it now. Weekly closes above it keep the recovery scenario alive. Losing it again would rhyme with 2022, where the second break was the one that mattered.
Score 20. The line this entire issue is about. If it prints, you’ll hear from me, and my plan gets busy.
~$53K. The market’s collective break-even. If price goes looking for it, that’s the zone where every previous bear found its floor.

The close

Every bear before this one ran the same checklist, and this one has barely started it. That’s not a reason for fear. It’s a reason for a plan.

The founding cohort for CSH’s paid launch is capped at 100 people, and that number is real, not marketing. If you want to be in it, the waitlist is here.

See you next Sunday. Boring buys until then.

— Jake

Join the waitlist here

One Signal Called Every Bottom Since 2014

Jake Pahor — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 09:08:09 GMT

Crypto Super Hub — Weekly Market Intelligence | 12 July 2026

Two weeks ago I told you Bitcoin was sitting in the bottom 3% of its entire history.

Today the score reads 24.3. Bottom 20%.

The market didn’t move 17 points. The model did. And I’d rather explain exactly what happened in plain English than quietly update a number and hope nobody checks.

Because here’s the thing: if you’re going to trust a score with real decisions, you deserve to know when it changes and why. That’s the whole difference between a system and a sales pitch.

Why the score moved when the market didn’t

Our old model had a flaw we’d known about for a while. It compared today’s price against all of Bitcoin’s history, including the early years when BTC swung thousands of percent in months. Those moves will never repeat. Because they sat in the baseline, the score quietly read too low and could no longer reach the top of its own range. Useful, but drifting.

The rebuilt model (v4.1, live now) measures where price sits inside a fair value band that projects forward with the asset, instead of staying anchored to 2012. Same 0 to 100 scale. Same job. Better ruler. We validated it against 21 hand-captured cycle tops and bottoms across Bitcoin’s history and it reads them roughly 35% more accurately than the old model. I’m not going to dump the full methodology in a newsletter, but we’ve published the plain-language version on the site because a score you can’t interrogate is just vibes with a number attached.

So what does the new ruler actually say?

This is where it gets interesting, and honestly a bit uncomfortable.

Every Bitcoin bear market since 2014 has ended the same way on this model: the score spent real time below 20 before the turn. The 2015 bottom printed around 7. December 2018 printed about 15. At the November 2022 price low of $15,742 the score read 18, and it spent weeks under 20 either side of it.

This cycle’s lowest print so far: 21.5, on July 1, with BTC at $58,550.

Close. Not there.

Read that however you like, but here’s my honest read: by the standard of every previous cycle, we haven’t yet seen the kind of washout that historically marked the end. That’s one possibility. The other is that this cycle stays shallower, the same way each cycle before it has been shallower than the last. Our October 2025 top printed a score of 59, nowhere near the 74 plus readings of past manias. Compressed tops might mean compressed bottoms. The past doesn’t predict the future, and I’m not going to pretend the model is a crystal ball. It’s a map of where we are, not a forecast of where we’re going.

What I actually did about it, because a score without a decision is just decoration:

I bought on July 1. Not because I called the low (I didn’t know it was the low, nobody did). Because my plan had a trigger sitting under that price and the trigger fired. It felt like a nothing day. The score printed the cheapest reading of the entire cycle and my phone didn’t buzz once about it. That’s what real accumulation zones feel like: boring, quiet, slightly nauseating.

I’m still holding a decent chunk of dry powder, and its deployment schedule is written down in my plan, tied to score levels, not to how I feel on the day. If the score prints below 20, my plan buys harder. If it doesn’t and the market turns anyway, my regular DCA already has me positioned. Either way I don’t have to be right. I just have to follow the thing I wrote down when I was calm.

The rebuilt score is live on the app right now, along with the history so you can check every claim I just made against the chart yourself.

Create your free CSH account

CSH Risk Dashboard

The numbers as of tonight:

BTC $64,085, up 0.96% for the week. The score sits at 24.3, up 1.6 points (7%) over the same stretch, and in the bottom 20% of all readings since 2011. We’re in the 20 to 30 band, a zone BTC has occupied for about 15% of its 14.4 year history.

Callback, because the system keeps receipts: the July 1 low at $58,550 printed the cycle’s cheapest score, 21.5. Since then, price is up roughly 9.5% and the score has followed it up. Nothing about that changes the plan. The next tranche has its trigger and the trigger hasn’t moved.

Quick Hits

BTC reclaimed the 200-week moving average this week, sitting near $62.9k, after losing it on July 1. So what: that line is the long-term holder’s line in the sand, and the last two bears spent months grinding below it. A quick reclaim is constructive. My plan doesn’t trade moving averages, but it’s the same shift the score’s momentum read picked up this week.

One Bitcoin now buys about 15.5 ounces of gold, its lowest in about three years. Gold has pulled back hard, from a record near $5,100 in January to around $4,120, and BTC has still lost ground against it: the ratio has roughly halved since the October top, when a coin bought close to 30 ounces. So what: the hard-money bid went to gold first this cycle. When crypto cycles have turned in the past, this ratio has swung back fast. My plan doesn’t trade the ratio, but there’s no cleaner picture of how unloved BTC is right now.

Bitcoin dominance is at 59%. So what: alt season is nowhere on the radar. Bear market rule from the playbook: alts bleed longer and harder than BTC. The plan accumulates the index leader first and asks questions about alts much later in the cycle.

Jake’s Workbench: Ship week

Biggest build week we’ve had. Tom was a machine:

The CSH Score v4.1 went live for BTC, with ETH, SOL and XRP close behind. The website copped a full UI overhaul, charts and mobile included. And we ran a full security audit ahead of something we’ve been working toward all year: the paid founding plan.

Straight up on that last one: there will be exactly 100 founding spots, with discounted pricing locked in permanently. That cap is real, not marketing theatre, so when it fills, it fills. If you want first look, create a free account and you’ll hear it from me before anyone else. For the price of a couple of coffees a month you’ll get the score, the Plan Builder, and a dashboard that keeps you honest on the days you don’t feel like being honest.

One apology while I’m here: if you were running a live plan against score triggers this week, the model change moved your reading and I know that’s annoying. Short-term pain, long-term much sharper tool. Full changelog is on the site.

Create your free CSH account

The Week Ahead

Three things I’m watching, none of them requiring a prediction:

The 200-week MA near $62.9K. We reclaimed it this week after losing it on July 1. Holding above it is the first good sign; losing it again puts the lower supports back in play.

The score’s path toward 20. Every previous bear printed below it before the turn and this one hasn’t. If it gets there, my plan buys harder. If it doesn’t, the DCA already has me positioned. Watch the number with me on the app.

The gold rotation. If the BTC/gold ratio stops falling, that’s the earliest tell that hard-money capital is starting to look our way again.

The Close

We rebuilt our own model 10 to 12 weeks before asking anyone to pay for it, and the new version makes today’s market look less like the bottom, not more. That’s the least convenient possible outcome for us commercially, and we shipped it anyway. Systems over hype was never meant to be a slogan.

Here’s my question for you this week, and I’ll feature the best answers next issue: what score level would make you deploy your last third of dry powder? Reply with a number. Mine’s already written in my plan.

If this issue was useful, hit the heart. It’s how Substack decides who else gets shown it.

Talk next Sunday,

Jake

3 Myths About Australia's New Crypto Rule

Jake Pahor — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 10:23:15 GMT

Crypto Super Hub — Weekly Market Intelligence | 5 July 2026

The phones rang all week at the exchange. Almost none of the calls were about the price.

That surprised me. BTC spent its first full week under the 200-week moving average since 2022, the CSH Score touched its lowest reading since the November 2022 bottom, and the thing Australian investors wanted to talk about was a compliance rule.

The travel rule went live on July 1. Between that, the end of the financial year, and the new super tax starting the same day, the desk was flat out. Repositioning, tax questions, people who read last week’s advice and waited until July to start their SMSF. And threaded through all of it, the same anxious question in a dozen different forms: is the government coming for my crypto?

Short answer: no. Longer answer below, because the fear is understandable and the facts are better than the vibes. There’s also a Score reading this week that has only happened three times before in fifteen years, and every time it mattered.

Let’s get into it.

CSH Risk Dashboard

CSH Score: 20.0 (BTC ~US$63,100 as of Sunday)

The Score spent almost the entire week below 20 and touched 15.5 on Wednesday 1 July, its lowest reading since the November 2022 cycle bottom printed 15.0. Sunday’s 20.0 sits in the bottom 6% of every daily reading since 2011.

Under the hood: long-term price position reads 18.2, short-term momentum 25.4, and market sentiment 23.0. All three components are in the green zone at once, which is rare.

Price context matters here. BTC closed last week near $61,600, just under the 200-week moving average around $62,660, and spent this week grinding back up to that line. The last time price spent real time below the 200-week was 2022. Below it sits the 300-week near $55K.

Plain-English read: this is statistically cheap. It is not a guarantee of a bottom. The Score read 15.0 in November 2022 and that was the low, but it also read under 16 for most of late 2011 while price kept chopping for months. Cheap is a condition, not a timestamp. The system’s job is to size your buying to the condition, not to call the day.

The Rule That Isn’t Coming for Your Crypto

From 1 July, every Australian exchange is required by AUSTRAC to collect and share information about the sender and recipient when crypto moves between platforms. It’s called the travel rule, it’s part of the AML/CTF reforms passed in 2024, and it applies to every transfer with no minimum threshold. A $5 transfer triggers the same data collection as $50,000.

I’ve spent months on the inside preparing for this, and the last fortnight fielding the panic. Three myths worth killing:

Myth 1: the exchanges are the bad guys. Exchanges didn’t ask for this rule. They’re legally required to run it or they get shut down. I’ll say the quiet part: most people building Australian exchanges are freedom-leaning crypto natives who hate paperwork as much as you do. And without trusted on-ramps and off-ramps, this industry doesn’t exist at the scale it does today. Blame the right party.

Myth 2: withdrawals are getting blocked. The opposite, mostly. Transfers to your own self-custody wallet still work, and under AUSTRAC’s own guidance they’re exempt from the information-sharing requirement between institutions. What changes is a few extra fields at the point of sending: is this your wallet, another exchange, or a third party. Provide it once per counterparty and it’s saved. If you’ve ever sent an international bank transfer, you’ve done this before.

Myth 3: it’s a stealth tax. It isn’t. No new tax was created on July 1 for ordinary crypto holders. It’s data collection for anti-money-laundering purposes, the same framework banks have operated under for years. The tax changes are real but separate, and they’re in Quick Hits.

Here’s my honest position. I want less regulation, not more, and I want crypto to keep its core promise as peer-to-peer electronic cash. But I’ve also sat across from people who lost six and seven figures to scammers, and traceability genuinely helps recover stolen funds and shut those operations down. It’s a balancing act, and this rule lands closer to “annoying paperwork” than “confiscation.”

What you should actually do: nothing dramatic. Keep good records, expect a couple of extra fields when you withdraw, and if self-custody matters to you, it still works exactly as it should.

Want your risk sized to conditions rather than headlines? Create your free CSH account and set your plan in Plan Builder.

Create your free CSH account

Jake’s Workbench

I bought this week. Small tier, midweek, with the Score at 15.5.

It felt bad, which is usually the sign it’s the right kind of buy. My plan has a tier for readings under 20 and the plan got the vote, not my gut. In 2021 my gut voted on everything and it cost me the entire bottom of the last cycle.

The bigger picture: I’m still sitting on a decent cash position, and the plan is to deploy it through CSH dynamic DCA between now and October. Not lump-summing, not waiting for a magic number. Sized buys, weighted by the Score, on a schedule. If we get one more leg down toward the 300-week, the tiers get bigger automatically. If we don’t, I’m already in.

That’s the whole point of building the system. The strategy was decided months ago on a calm day. This week just executed it.

Quick Hits

A $1.4 billion year. The US President’s financial disclosure, released Tuesday, showed roughly $1.4 billion in crypto-related income for 2025, including about $635 million in royalties tied to the $TRUMP token. That token peaked at $74.24 within a day of its January 2025 launch and now trades around $1.69, down 94%. So what: the people who launch these products get paid either way. Always check who profits from what you’re buying.

Division 296 is live. From 1 July, earnings attributable to super balances above $3 million cop an extra 15% tax. So what: most SMSFs are untouched, but if your balance trajectory could cross $3M this cycle, model it now, not later.

First weekly close below the 200-week MA since 2022. BTC closed last week near $61,600 against the ~$62,660 line. So what: reclaiming that level on a weekly close is the single cleanest signal that the worst is behind us. Until then, respect the downside.

The travel rule has no minimum threshold. Unlike most overseas versions, Australia’s rule applies to every transfer, any size, from dollar one. So what: don’t bother structuring small transfers; it changes nothing except your time.

The Week Ahead

The 200-week weekly close. The line sits near $62,660 and price is grinding right at it. Above it on a weekly close, the relief rally has legs. Below it, the 300-week near $55K stays the base-case magnet.

New financial year flows. July 1 unlocked a wave of SMSF establishments and contributions. I’ll be watching whether that structural bid shows up in the data while retail stays absent.

The Score under 16. Only four periods since 2011 have printed sub-16 readings: late 2011, January 2015, November 2022, and this week. In January 2015, BTC was $178 and sat at $430 a year later. In November 2022 it was $15,781 and above $35,000 a year later. Base rates, not prophecy. But I know which side of that history I want to be positioned on.

The Close

Everyone is kicking crypto right now. Engagement is at cycle lows, the grifters are cashing out, and the asset just closed below a level it hasn’t lived under since 2022. This is exactly what the best accumulation windows in fifteen years of data have looked like. Zoom out, trust your plan, and lock in.

Bull markets make you money. Bear markets make you bloody rich.

Create your free CSH account and let the Score size your next buy.

Create your free CSH account

Talk next week, Jake

Bottom 3% Since 2011

Jake Pahor — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:15:06 GMT

Crypto Super Hub — Weekly Market Intelligence | 28 June 2026

I sit at a crypto exchange during the day. The clearest signal I’ve seen all year isn’t on a chart. It’s who stopped calling.

Retail has quietly disappeared. The everyday buyer who was here eighteen months ago has thinned right out, and the money still coming through the door is increasingly super money. Self-managed funds, deploying on a schedule, unbothered by the red.

The two trends are happening at once, and they say more about human behaviour than any indicator I could show you. Retail got washed out. Some ran out of capital. Most just lost interest the day prices stopped going up. What’s left standing are the people whose money is locked in super, who can’t touch it and won’t flinch with it.

That’s the whole thing in one sentence. Most people invest on emotion. They buy strength and disappear in weakness. The ones still here are behaving systematically almost by accident, because the structure forces them to.

That gap, between buying on feeling and buying on a system, is the exact reason we built CSH.

CSH Risk Dashboard

BTC: $59,893 | CSH Score: 17.3 | Zone: Deep accumulation | 7-day score change: -18.4%

The Score is at 17.3. That’s the bottom 3% of every reading since 2011.

To put that band in context: the last bear market bottom printed 15.0 in November 2022, with price at $15,781. The most recent all-time high, $124,774 last October, carried a score of 65.4. We’re sitting much closer to the first number than the second.

The three things that drive the Score all point the same way right now. Long-term price position, the heaviest input, reads 16.8. Short-term momentum is at 18.7. And market sentiment, the Fear and Greed read, is down at 18.0, which is extreme fear. When all three are this low at once, you’re deep in the part of the cycle nobody enjoys living through.

Here’s how I’m reading the move. BTC closed below its 200-week moving average this week, around $62K, a line it has rarely spent real time beneath. I think we now test the 300-week, currently just under $55K. That’s the level price sat below for roughly seven months through the last bear, from August 2022 into early 2023, around the FTX collapse. It’s not a line we just kissed and bounced off. We lived under it for a while. My base case isn’t a straight line down from here. I can see a relief rally back toward the bear-market band first, then one more leg lower into Q4 that does the real work.

That’s a view, not a forecast, and I hold it loosely. The part I’m acting on is the Score, not the path.

The dip that used to scare me

In 2021, a 10% drop would make me feel physically sick. I’d sit there refreshing the screen, running the same three questions on a loop. Should I sell to free up cash. Is this the bottom. Are we going lower.

I never had an answer, because I never had a plan. So I’d freeze. And the freezing is what cost me. I had the conviction in that first bear market. I believed in the asset. I just had no system that made me act on it, so I waited for a cleaner signal that never came, and I under-bought the exact zone I’d spent months waiting for.

That’s the regret that still sits with me from 2022. Not a trade I made. The BTC I didn’t buy.

This week BTC fell through $60K, and I noticed something had changed. The sick feeling was gone. In its place was something closer to relief. Same person, opposite reaction, and the only difference between the two cycles is that one had a system behind it and one had nothing.

Now when price drops, the Score drops with it. My average buy price comes down. I get to put capital to work in a band that has rarely shown up in 15 years of history. The dread became opportunity, and not because I got braver. It changed because I stopped trusting my gut and started trusting a number.

That reframe only works because two things are true now that weren’t true in 2021. I have cash set aside, waiting. And I have a number I trust to tell me when to spend it.

So I’ve spent most of this year sitting on my hands, waiting for the Score to slip under 20. It did. I’m accumulating BTC and only BTC, because it still carries the best risk-adjusted setup I can see, and I think the broader alt market needs one more proper reset before it goes anywhere. The backdrop isn’t doing risk assets any favours either, between rate pressure at home, sticky inflation, and money chasing AI names and private-market hype. So I’m holding the line on the BTC-first plan.

In ten years I doubt it’ll matter whether I bought at $60K, $55K or $40K. What will matter is that I built the position, instead of waiting for a bottom that only ever looks obvious once it’s gone.

Want the number I’m building this plan around? The CSH Score is free.

Create your free CSH account.

Jake’s Workbench

A reminder for anyone setting up a self-managed fund for crypto right now. The start date matters more than people expect, and we are days away from it mattering a lot.

A few of the trustees I speak to are deliberately waiting until 1 July to deploy. The logic is simple. Begin in June and you’re generally up for a full year of fund running costs plus a tax return for a few weeks of actual activity. Wait for the new financial year and you skip the FY26 paperwork altogether. For a brand new fund that can be the difference of a couple of thousand dollars in accountant fees, for no change to the actual strategy.

This isn’t advice on whether to set one up. Plenty of people get that part wrong by rushing. It’s a timing point worth raising with your accountant before you do anything this week, because the window closes when the financial year resets.

Quick Hits

Price closed below the 200-week. BTC slipped under its 200-week moving average this week, around $62K, a level it has rarely spent real time beneath. So what: historically this line has marked deep value, but it has never been tested in a rate environment like this one, so treat it as context, not a guarantee.

Extreme fear, again. The Fear and Greed Index is parked in extreme fear, which feeds directly into the Score’s sentiment input. So what: sentiment this washed out has lined up with accumulation zones before, but it can stay washed out longer than feels comfortable.

SpaceX has given back a third of its peak. Two weeks after we wrote about skipping the biggest listing in history, SpaceX (SPCX) has fallen from a high of $225.64 on 16 June to around $153 now, roughly a 32% drop from the top. So what: not a victory lap, and I’m still bullish on the company on a ten-year view. The lesson is about hype absorbing attention and capital, then mean-reverting, the same pattern that plays out in crypto.

Retail’s quiet exit. The clearest read from the exchange seat this year is how thin the everyday buyer has become. So what: when retail gives up is historically closer to the bottom than the top, though “historically” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The Week Ahead

1 July, financial year reset. Watch for SMSF capital that’s been parked on the sidelines to start deploying once the new year ticks over and the paperwork penalty disappears.

The US jobs report, the print that matters. The June nonfarm payrolls land this week, the single biggest macro event on the calendar. Consensus is around 100,000 jobs added with unemployment near 4.3%, a result that would keep the Fed on hold in July. A surprise either way shifts rate expectations, and rate expectations move risk assets like BTC.

A new voice at the Fed. Kevin Warsh makes one of his first public appearances as Fed Chair this week. Markets will be listening for any signal on the rate path now the chair has changed, especially with pressure building for cuts.

Thin liquidity into the long weekend. US stock and bond markets are closed Friday 3 July for the Fourth of July holiday. Lighter volume around a long weekend can exaggerate moves, so don’t read too much into a sharp candle on low participation.

The 200-week as the line in the sand. Whether BTC reclaims that level or stays beneath it tells you more than any headline. My base case is a possible relief rally toward the bear-market band, then one more leg lower into Q4, but I hold that loosely. The Score is the thing I’m acting on, not the path.

The Close

The market this year has been a sorting machine. It’s quietly separated the people investing on emotion from the people running a process, and only one of those groups is still standing.

You don’t need to call the exact bottom. You need a number you trust and the discipline to act on it before it feels safe, because by the time it feels safe the discount is gone.

The Score’s at 16.9. I’m telling you where it is, not what to do with it. Create your free CSH account and see the same number I’m building my plan around.

Create your free CSH account.

See you next week.

— Jake

Why I stopped trying to call the bottom

Jake Pahor — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 08:33:56 GMT

Crypto Super Hub — Weekly Market Intelligence | 21 June 2026

It was quiet on the desk again this week. Not panic-quiet. Bored-quiet. The phones don’t ring because nobody wants to think about Bitcoin at all.

That sounds like bad news. After enough cycles, you learn to read it as the opposite.

Bitcoin doesn’t always bottom on a single violent crash that washes everyone out in an afternoon. Sometimes it bottoms on exhaustion. A slow grind, sideways and down, until the last person who was going to give up finally has, and stopped looking at the chart.

There are two kinds of capitulation. Price capitulation is loud: the crash, the red candle, the headline. Time capitulation is silent, and it’s the harder one to sit through, because nothing tells you it’s over. You just slowly stop caring. The boredom does the work the crash usually does.

That second kind is what this feels like. And I’ve stopped fearing it, because it’s the stage that comes before the turn, not after. So this week I stopped trying to pick the exact low and went looking for something more useful: what the data actually does before a bottom arrives.

CSH Risk Dashboard

The CSH Score sits at 21.2 today, with Bitcoin around $64,200. On 7 June it dipped into the mid-teens at the $60,862 low, putting us in the bottom 7% of every reading since 2011. On a fifteen-year scale of cheap to expensive, we’re near the cheap end.

Here’s the part I only saw this week. Digging through our all-time chart, the one that lets you click any era and read what the Score said at the time, and I went hunting for one thing: where did the Score sit right before each bear market ended.

The pattern was cleaner than I expected. In four of the last five bears, the Score fell below 20 before the bottom was in. 2015 hit 15. The 2020 COVID crash hit 19. 2022 hit 15. The only exception in fifteen years was 2018, which bottomed without the Score ever leaving the high 20s.

This cycle has already been below 20. That doesn’t time the bottom, and I won’t pretend it does. It tells you which neighbourhood you’re standing in, and right now it isn’t the expensive one. That’s the whole job of a risk gauge. Not prophecy. Position.

For the curious, what’s driving the Score today: long-term price position is doing the heavy lifting at 19.8, short-term momentum at 25.8, sentiment at 23.0. All low. None screaming. A quietly cheap market, not a crashing one.

Why the boring number beats the bottom call

Half my inbox is some version of the same question: is this the bottom. I can’t answer it, and you should be wary of anyone who says they can.

So instead of an answer, here’s a system that doesn’t need one.

Start with the calendar. The second half of US midterm years (2014, 2018, 2022) has historically been one of the stronger windows to be buying Bitcoin on a schedule. We’re in one now. Pair that with a Score in its bottom decile and you don’t have a prediction, you have a starting point. A reason to buy steadily, on a schedule, without needing to nail the exact low.

Now the chart I keep coming back to, because it’s the heart of this issue and simpler than it sounds.

It’s the percentage of supply in profit versus in loss. Picture every coin in existence. For each one, ask: was it last bought above or below today’s price? Above, it’s “in profit.” Below, it’s “in loss.” Add it all up and you get two lines that map the mood of the whole market. When nearly everything’s in profit, people are complacent. When the loss line climbs and a big share of coins are underwater, that’s pain, and pain is what bottoms are made of.

Here’s the history. At each of the last three bear bottoms, the loss line climbed above the profit line first, then the price low followed. But the gap between the cross and the low was different every time, and naming those gaps is the honest way to use this:

2015: the lines crossed in January, and the low landed within days.
2018: they crossed during the November capitulation, and Bitcoin bottomed on 15 December, around three to four weeks later.
2022: they first crossed mid-year after the spring crash, and the low didn’t arrive until 21 November. Roughly five months.

So the same setup has resolved anywhere from days to five months out. The cross is a precondition, not a starting gun. Right now the lines read 52.6% in profit, 47.4% in loss, churning around the halfway mark, the zone they pass through before a bottom forms. We’re in the right part of the story. We’re not necessarily on the last page.

Which is why I’ve stopped trying to be right about the low and started being consistent about the buy. When this cycle’s in the rear-view, it’ll matter far more that I kept accumulating through the boring part than whether I called the day. Nobody rings a bell. The schedule is the bell.

Create your free CSH account

Jake’s Workbench

Most of my spare hours this week went into refining that all-time chart and digging through what it shows. The idea was simple: stop asking people to trust the number and let them check it instead. Click back to any point since 2011 and see what the Score read at the time. Every top. Every bottom. Mark our homework yourself.

But with the whole fifteen-year history open, a second chart caught my eye, and it’s the uncomfortable one. I’d be doing you a disservice to leave it out just because it doesn’t fit the bullish story.

It’s the Terminal Price model, and what matters is two reference lines. The Realized Price is roughly what the whole market actually paid for its coins, the market’s cost basis. Below it sits the Balanced Price, a deeper fair-value line. The pattern: in every previous bear, price didn’t just dip toward these lines, it sliced through the Realized Price and wicked down toward the Balanced Price before the selling was done. That’s what a full detox has looked like every time.

Today, Realized sits around $53K, Balanced near $38K, and Bitcoin at roughly $64K. We haven’t even touched the first line, let alone the second. If this cycle rhymes with the last three, there’s a path into the low $40s before it’s genuinely over.

So here’s where I stand, both things at once. My base case is constructive: the Score’s in the bottom 7%, the seasonal window is favourable, and I’m still accumulating with conviction. But I’d rather show you the bearish read I can’t rule out than sell you a floor I can’t promise. A system that only works if the number goes up isn’t a system. It’s a hope with a logo.

One more thing, quietly. A few of the people testing the chart have started asking how to get the full version. It’s coming. More on that in the weeks ahead.

Quick Hits

The Score hit its lowest since the last bear bottom. It touched the mid-teens at the 7 June low of $60,862, the cheapest reading on our gauge since 2022.
The market is split roughly 50/50 underwater. Supply in profit/loss reads 52.6% / 47.4%, the lines churning in the zone they’ve crossed before past bottoms.
The US and Iran signed a ceasefire framework, and for us it’s an oil story. It’s a 60-day memorandum to negotiate, signed 17 June, not a done deal, and already strained. The angle that matters here: a calmer Strait of Hormuz means easier oil, and oil has been the main thing feeding the inflation that keeps the Fed hawkish. Less oil pressure, more room for risk assets to breathe. Worth watching, not banking on.
Kevin Warsh ran his first Fed meeting, and the style change is the story. Rates held at 3.50 to 3.75% on 17 June. The shift was how he communicates: forward guidance dropped, no rate projection of his own, the statement cut to 130 words. Markets sold off after. His line is that markets “perform best when they react to incoming data,” which means less hand-holding and sharper moves both ways. A less predictable Fed is a choppier ride for everything, Bitcoin included.
Division 296, the $3M super tax, becomes law on 1 July. The threshold is per person, so a couple can hold up to $6M across two balances before it bites. Relevant for anyone weighing Bitcoin inside an SMSF.

The Week Ahead

A lot of smart people are circling October, twelve months on from the October 2025 top, as the seasonal window for a low. I lean that way too. But markets owe us nothing, and a macro shock could force the loud kind of capitulation before the slow kind finishes. What I’m watching:

A new Fed chair finding his feet. Warsh will guide the market less and let the data talk more. Expect sharper reactions to each inflation and jobs print while everyone learns his style.
Whether the Iran ceasefire holds. A fragile 60-day framework, not peace. If the Strait of Hormuz genuinely calms, oil eases and so does inflation pressure. If it breaks, the opposite. The macro swing factor for the next two months.
Seasonality, honestly. September has historically been the weakest month for equities, though that softens when the trend going in is healthy. Worth knowing, not worth fearing.
Whether the IPO froth cools. SpaceX just completed the largest listing ever, with Anthropic and OpenAI lined up behind it. A wobble in that enthusiasm tends to spill into crypto risk appetite.

None of these are forecasts. They’re the cracks worth watching while you keep executing your plan.

The Close

Boredom isn’t the enemy. It’s the toll you pay on the way to the other side. The people who build a plan during the quiet don’t have to make decisions during the noise.

The whole issue in three lines: the data says we’re in the right neighbourhood, one honest model says we might still have lower to go, and neither changes what you actually do. Keep buying the plan. Stop trying to be right about the day.

Build the plan. Run it. Let the boredom do its work.

— Jake

Create your free CSH account

Why I skipped the biggest IPO in history

Jake Pahor — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:05:30 GMT

Crypto Super Hub — Weekly Market Intelligence | 14 June 2026

The biggest IPO in history happened this week, and I didn’t buy a single share.

SpaceX went public on Friday. Not just a rocket company. This is the business behind Starlink’s global internet network, the launch provider the rest of the industry depends on, and an AI arm folded in through the xAI merger. The stock opened, ripped, and by the close the company was worth $2.11 trillion. To put that in plain terms: one company is now worth more than every Bitcoin in existence, and very nearly as much as every cryptocurrency on earth combined. Elon Musk became the first person in history worth more than a trillion dollars, on paper, in a single afternoon.

My phone lit up. Customers at work asking how to get in. Mates who’ve never bought a stock suddenly wanting a piece. And every time the whole room leans one way like that, I’ve trained myself to ask the same two questions. Where’s my edge here? And where’s everyone else’s?

I don’t have one in SpaceX. Neither, if we’re honest, do you. So I did the boring thing instead and bought more Bitcoin.

CSH Risk Dashboard

The CSH Score bottomed at 16.6 last weekend, the cheapest Bitcoin has read on risk since November 2022. It’s since ticked up to 18.8 as price bounced off $60K back toward $63.8K. Either way, we’re in the bottom few percent of nearly fifteen years of daily readings, and we just dipped under February’s panic low of 18.9.

The more useful lens this week isn’t the number, it’s the calendar. Bitcoin is doing in 2026 what it tends to do in US midterm years: sell off hard and carve out a major low somewhere around the middle of the year. It happened in 2018 and again in 2022. Worth being honest about how those played out, though. In both cases the mid-year low was not the final low. 2018 bottomed properly in December, six months later and far lower. 2022 bottomed in November at $15,781. So a low forming now fits the pattern, but it doesn’t mean the low is in.

Here’s why that distinction matters less than it looks. If you’re trying to pick the exact bottom, you’re playing a game almost nobody wins, this week or any week. If you’re running the CSH Score and a Plan Builder strategy, you’re not picking a day. From the bottom of the risk range, you’re accumulating into weakness on a schedule and letting the system size the entries. Whether the floor is $60K now or something lower in Q3 or Q4, the playbook from a reading this low is the same: this is the part of the cycle you DCA through, not the part you sit out waiting for a signal that only ever looks obvious in hindsight.

Bitcoin’s also sitting almost exactly on its 200-week moving average near $62,000, the line that has floored every prior cycle. It doesn’t have to hold. But on risk, on where price sits against its own long-term trend, this is deep value, and the system is flashing greener than it did in February.

Why I’m not buying the biggest IPO in history

Back to SpaceX, because the real lesson of the week has nothing to do with rockets.

Three reasons I sat it out.

Start with the maths. SpaceX priced at a $1.77 trillion valuation on about $18.7 billion of revenue. Meta earns more than ten times that revenue and is valued below where SpaceX opened. At that price you’re not buying a business, you’re buying a story about the next twenty years, and you’re buying it at the most expensive, most hyped moment in the company’s life, from the people who got in early and are finally taking their exit. If you’re retail buying the open, you’re the liquidity they’re selling into. Musk himself is locked up and can’t sell for over a year. Worth sitting with, that one.

Then there’s the edge, or my lack of one. The engineers and funds who held SpaceX equity for a decade had an edge, and they’ve been paid for it. The person buying on day one off the back of a headline has none. One of the most expensive lessons crypto ever taught me was the difference between a good company and a good investment, and how to spot when I’m the sucker at the table. In 2021 I bought tokens I didn’t understand because everyone around me was up 300%. I know exactly what that feeling costs, because I’ve paid it.

The last reason is the one I actually like. While every eyeball on earth is pointed at a rocket company and the word “trillionaire,” almost nobody is talking about Bitcoin. It’s been left for dead again. The calls at work went quiet at $60K, same as they did in February. That’s precisely the setup I want. You don’t get to accumulate the premier digital asset at the bottom 2% of its risk range while the room is excited about it. You get to do it while the room has wandered off to look at something shinier.

Edge is knowing which game is yours. Mine isn’t a trillion-dollar IPO I’d be buying on vibes. Mine is a fifteen-year risk model that is, right now, about as loud as it gets.

Want to see where the CSH Score sits right now?

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Jake’s Workbench

We shipped this week, market chaos and all. The all-time chart now renders Bitcoin on a proper logarithmic scale, so the early years are actually readable instead of a flat line hugging zero. We also squashed a bug in the price-label toggles. Small stuff, but it’s the difference between a tool you trust and one you fight.

Two of us build CSH on nights and weekends, and one of us writes the code. Neither of us could move at this pace without AI handling the parts that used to eat days. The point was never to outsource the thinking, it was to clear the boring work out of the way so the thinking is all that’s left. A bigger overhaul of the dashboard and the plans section is coming. It’s going to look the part.

Quick Hits

SpaceX cracked $2 trillion intraday. At its session high the company touched roughly $2.21 trillion, brushing right up against the entire crypto market’s $2.26 trillion. One company, nearly all of crypto.

Bitcoin had its worst week since February. The driver wasn’t a hack or a ban, it was the spot ETFs running a sustained run of outflows. The flows that powered the rally up are now pulling the other way, and they tend to stabilise before price does.

The score dipped under its February low. 16.6 last weekend against 18.9 in February. Cheaper on risk than the drop that scared everyone three months ago, with far fewer people paying attention this time.

The Week Ahead

Watch ETF flows above everything else. A few days of net inflows would be the first real sign the selling has worn itself out.

Keep an eye on whether $62K holds. That’s the 200-week moving average, the line that’s floored every past cycle. A weekly close below it would be worth respecting. Holding it would be the system’s read confirmed by the chart.

And watch the noise. As long as the headlines are about rockets and trillionaires instead of Bitcoin, the accumulation window stays open.

The Close

The biggest IPO in history was the easiest no I’ve made all year. Not because SpaceX is a bad company, but because it wasn’t my game, and I’ve paid enough tuition to know the difference now.

The score is at the bottom of its fifteen-year range and the room has looked away. I know which of those two facts matters to me.

Buy where you have an edge. For me, this week, that was clear.

Create your free CSH account and see the score for yourself at cryptosuperhub.com.au.

Create your free account

— Jake