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.
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
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.