Two weeks ago, I pointed to a "crossroads moment" for crypto. With the price action since then it is now clear that we are once again in a bear market. But why is this time so different? It essentially all comes down to two things.
In other words, BTC still performed well in the 4 year cycle, going from 15k to 125k which is a 700% increase. It topped in Q4 of 2025 as expected, but everyone thought that a blow off top was necessary for it to peak... ALTs on the other hand completely disappointed in that there was essentially 0 growth overall and people waited for a bull run that never came!
Ouch! ALT hodlers have been seriously screwed over - no sugar coating possible (except if you were in memes and sold).
Yes, just like always during a bear market, BTC was not able to reclaim the 50 SMA. Price needed to go over 102k sustainably, but instead we got the dump to the mid 70s. The bear is in play now, but perhaps there is still some good news.
With the peak being not very impressive for BTC, there is a good chance that we might not get a very dramatic bear market as well. In fact, we can see that the lows have been climbing over the cycles. If we take some fibs as guidance, it seems that BTC could perhaps reclaim the 50s in Q4 of 2026. Yes - no extended 5 year bull market after all...
...are screwed. But it is actually somewhat interesting because so far we have seen the same pattern as in previous bears: ALTs underperform BTC massively; but instead of trending downward from their ATHs, they are already at their ATLs... it seems to me that many projects won't be able to survive such a correction, especially if it happens over an extended period of 2-3 years again! This will cleanse the market so to speak and perhaps this is needed for solid projects to finally see some growth again.
The TOTAL2 chart gives us a hint how severe the correction could be for ALTs.
Using the 200 SMA we can see that it generally hovered around that line at peak bear. The corrections have also been getting lower and I am getting a similar correction here with around -55% for Q4 of 2025.
The good news for both markets is that we are perhaps already half way through the bear!
I am sure that everyone agrees that this cycle (and yes, it seems that the 4 year cycle is still alive after all), has been a complete disappointment. But the insight here is that it has been especially so for ALT coin hodlers! Bitcoiners have had an "okay" season and they should get ready to buy in the 50s. Depending on what ALT you are hodling, targets will of course vary, but be prepared that it will get ugly. Here I would expect that we will see a split into two categories: one in which ALTs will fail and the other in which the correction will be hard, but not brutal and a recovery that might actually be worthy of a bull again.
As a general reminder: Please keep in mind that none of this is official investment advice! Crypto trading entails a great deal of risk; never spend money that you can't afford to lose!
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