Not Done Yet

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:01]Hello followers of the four-year journey. This is Bob Lucas on April 16th, 2026.

[00:00:07]I hope you're doing well and been staying safe since the last video. This bare market remains in control as far as I'm concerned. I think this video is going to be relatively short compared to the prior ones. Um, I know there's a lot of hope out there. I see a lot of people on social showing all these kind of bullish charts and reasons. uh again liquidity, business cycle and and so on. Uh but the reality remains that Bitcoin is not really showing a whole lot of life in an environment that is conducive to much higher prices. And you'll see that in the charts here. It's quite clear on a monthly perspective that we remain not too far off the bottom that we tagged here in February at the $60,000 level.

[00:00:53]were up about 15,000 barely 20% by Bitcoin standards. Not a whole lot, especially considering the equity markets in this past week have recovered from a correction and are now pushing through all-time highs. You have to ask yourself the simple question, how can equities, how can the broader markets be at all-time highs, shrugging off all sorts of sort of, you know, perceived issues to to the economy and so on where Bitcoin remains here at the bottom uh near the lows that I printed just two months ago. I think the simple answer is that the demand is just not there. Still a tremendous amount of whales selling, I'd have to imagine. Even though you have the likes of Strategy, Michael Sailor for example, and the ETF inflows printing and buying up to a billion dollars every other day by the looks of it. Yet price remains near the bottom and that's simply a function of where we stand in the cycle in my opinion. Also you have to consider that we are down 50% from the peak to the current trough in the cycle over a five month blood bath here from that peak to the low and you would have expected a much stronger at least counter trend move as a result of that and yet here we stand uh struggling to to find any sort of upside momentum. So as far as I'm concerned we remain locked in this bare market cycle.

[00:02:26]We of course peaked on month 35. That's more than clear now. That is the absolute peak of the cycle. Anything that moves beyond or close to that level in the future is part of a new cycle.

[00:02:38]But here we are at the month 39 low and now currently sitting at month 41. The positive in all this is that we are now quickly approaching the very early timing band for a cycle low. I don't I doubt based on the historical structure and the way Bitcoin behaves in the bare market, I doubt seriously that those lows are in. Uh but there is the chance that in a kind of comeback here towards the timing for a cycle low that we don't exceed those $60,000 levels that we come off and sort of double bottom off that off that level. That would be more of a bullish interpretation in my opinion um and not necessarily an expectation.

[00:03:24]Right now on the monthly we're seeing classic signs of turnover. We got the 10-month firmly trending lower. We're crossing 10 over 20. So the confirmations are all there. Obviously we're in a a full-blown bare market right now. And the fact that this can't even give us some type of upside strong rally here is just highlighting just how much pressure Bitcoin rem is under and no excuses really for Bitcoin. Here's the S&P 500 here over a 3-we period shrugging off a 10% correction to an all-time high. Yet Bitcoin here remains very close or very near the lows that it printed back here in February. Now, short-term, intermediate time frame, it looks as if it wants to make that move higher. It's certainly overdue, that type of move.

[00:04:15]But again, what uh sticks out more than anything else here is the trend that we're in. And for trend followers, this is pretty much a very well-defined downtrend that we're in. Uh people want to be bullish. They want us they want to talk about Bitcoin being back over $100,000 by the summer or the end of the year. seeing a lot of big accounts still talking about 180,000 200,000 by the end of the year citing all sorts of reasons for for that to happen but the simple fact remains that that is based only on hope and not on the evidence that we see on these charts. The evidence suggests as we have seen in the past this cyclical nature of Bitcoin and that we're in a bare market downtrend. We look at Bitcoin here on the weekly.

[00:05:02]Clearly, we have the high, the peak in October. And let's not forget that Bitcoin peaked four months before the equity market did. It is four months ahead in its downtrend.

[00:05:13]And again, equities started to make a move down and have recovered. Yet, we see very anemic recovery here out of Bitcoin. Looking at this trend, you had the big first peak, five, six weeks down, then a sideways move, and then another six weeks down. So the argument here is simply that this is just trending sideways, recharging before another leg lower. That is what we should be looking out for. Also, when you just flip the narrative a little bit to maybe make it clearer because we're more um more used to seeing charts in an uptrend. If you just invert this scale, right, to to get more familiar here, if this was a bull market and you would have double bottomed out of here, you would have had a big initial surge, some euphoric move, a pull back towards the 10-month moving average or 10 week moving average in this case. bit of a shakeout and then a massive move up to take out that last major high there in the downtrend confirming this new directional change. Here's a bit of a euphoric move and attempt to get back up there a few times and then back below the 10e moving average. So in a bull market, this is around about where you would think it bottoms out and then resumes this trend. So this is a very well-defined trend that we're seeing.

[00:06:36]Unfortunately though, it's not a bull trend. It's it's a bare trend. So, right now, given that the 4-year cycle is still in decline, that we haven't reached the typical timing window, the fact that it's extremely weak in this market in relation to equity markets and so on. And don't forget, we still have an administration here in the US that is super pro crypto. They are significantly invested through enterprises of family and connections and so on. Uh they are vested in it success. They are pushing through new regulations. We also have significant amount of uh traditional finance financial groups entering the space launching new product new ETFs and so on. they all have a vested interest and yet given all that given Michael Sailor's buys through uh through some of its its vehicles there again it remains weak so for me this is quite simple it's a matter more about patience than anything else you've gone through since the highs here now a five going on sixmonth period in the bare market we are down 40% as we speak 50% to the lows and this is just a matter of just waiting it out and waiting for that bare process to unfold as it has and as it has done in the past as I expect it will into this window where we'll get a flush out. Now, we did get quite a bit of sentiment reset during this move near bare market low levels. I just think it's too early. And the fact that it's acting weak right now, suggests that once we get sentiment back to sort of a neutral stance, which we're getting closer to to, I think you'll see this roll over once more in the second leg of this. I think what we're seeing here is potentially a back filling exercise. In any real downtrend or sell off or bare market, you typically get that first big initial move down uh get to a sort of a capitulation level or Rudy oversold level. Then you get that natural reflexive sort of bounce back towards the 10-month moving average and then the uh the heart of the bare market takes hold once more and then we continue lower in the sort of second phase of a bare market. That's traditionally how most markets would unfold.

[00:08:59]For this to just go down straight from a high to a five a fivemon low and then start a new bull market would be very unusual in my opinion. As I mentioned earlier, the bull case is more something like we can bounce and then you know sort of come back down but sort of hold this level and retest this level in that window and then resume the next four years cycle. That is a real possibility in my opinion mostly because yes we do have a lot of traditional finance still flooding the space. We have Michael Sailor buying billions upon billions and possibly we get to a point where the whales are finally exhausted from their selling. So this is certainly a possibility but I don't think it's something we can uh bank on and assume is the uh the default case because historically uh the declines from a peak to a trough for Bitcoin have been significant. Of course they're diminishing as this gets bigger and wider in adoption. Uh but the last cycle was something like 76% decline currently from peak to trough 50%. the cycle before the last decline something like 87%. So somewhere around the 66 67% from a high to a low also makes some sense and taking out this low also makes sense. So making a lower low into the into the bare market low area also makes a lot of sense. So that is the main primary leaning that I have here. But certainly in the short term here after five big red candles, seeing one big green candle would certainly fit the bill. So I think right now in the intermediate time frame, here's the weekly, I think we can see a good move up. And now being sort of locked in this 10-week move and struggling to get out of this. Any move above where we were just this week or what we retested the March high 76,000 getting through 76 is probably going to unlock some real positive sentiment, some bullish sentiment and I think people start chasing that and that could lead to a good significant move at least to 80 but probably even towards 86,000 before then I think the bare market begins to take hold once more. Looking at that on the monthly, the declining 10-month moving average is at 91. By next month, you're looking at around about 86 87,000.

[00:11:23]So, filling that gap back towards that declining 10-month moving average would be very normal and probably the expectation here. So, I think that would serve as sort of a trap, get people feeling as if, okay, I got to be involved, otherwise I'm going to miss that big move up to 160 and 180,000. And I think that's where people um you know, sort of end up uh losing more in a bare market than than anything else by just being fooled by these more intermediate time frame moves than anything else.

[00:11:56]from a from a longer sort of cyclical view of this, this just seems like a natural uh bounce off an extremely deeply oversold level.

[00:12:08]So from a positioning standpoint, from a model portfolio standpoint, currently sitting at around about 50% allocated in Bitcoin, 50% in the cash, the whole point of the cash position is to accumulate more Bitcoin at hopefully a lower price. So I think here there's no rush to get back position. The average sell on that it's around about 85,000 I believe. So even if we were and even if this was making some type of surprising bottom or early cycle bottom uh there would be an opportunity possibly a little bit higher than the average sell price but to get back in. I don't think this market really runs away runs away from us without being able to get back in with very little loss in terms of uh you know the opportunity ahead. But for now still focusing on this window. This window marks a range. It's not an absolute area where it must bottom out.

[00:13:04]Cycles will bottom out sort of generally for the most part within a 10% range of either side. So sort of a 3 to four month early or 3 to four months late bringing in the sort of July time frame as the earliest kind of window where we should be bottoming out. But again that could also come mostly via time. So we can come back up here next month in May, maybe wick up to that point and then June, July back to test this area and possibly even just form a slight higher low there and then begin that process of coming out. That would certainly satisfy a 4-year cycle low in a very bullish environment. Um, but I think again without any more substantial price declines, I think it's more about time than anything else as we head into this window.

[00:13:58]Currently, the portfolio states that at the 50,000 level, just basically buy up uh whatever you have in the 4-year cycle allocation. That should be a level that even though we can go much lower than that historically, if we were to decline by that sort of 65 70% levels, we're talking about a significant drop to around about the $40,000 level. I think the $40,000 level level represents around about a 68% drop. So that in hindsight, if it was to happen, would not be surprising, right? given what it's done historically, the pattern is very very clear. A re a draw down from the peak to to the trough at around 41,000 representing around 67% decline would fit um sort of a diminishing uh decline over time but yet still satisfy the the the pattern that we've seen over time. Where from a price perspective that ultimately bottoms out of course is always very difficult to to do. It's not about predicting where that is for me.

[00:15:06]It's more about the window of time than it is the price. As I mentioned earlier in the video, down to this 60,000 level does satisfy a bare market decline. That in itself is a 50% decline from the peak. So from a price perspective, I would be okay with that. But I think what we're looking more for is more time to to unfold and more of a wash out over time. There's still quite a bit of bullish sentiment there. many of the big accounts or the very vocal accounts are still sort of saying as they have been since the 120s that we're going to 180 or 200 this year. So none of those seem to have sort of capitulated on that view. So I do feel that it's more about time than anything else. Uh which is why at the moment at the 50,000 level uh I'd be happy to just reallocate knowing of course that getting down to even as low as a 40,000 print or even below that is still a real possibility in the coming months. But the attitude at that point once you get down to say a $50,000 level there's an attitude that we should have which is we still believe significantly in the long-term vision of Bitcoin. My view is that of course it's going to get back above 100,000 and then make a push towards that 200 $250,000 level over the coming years and that we shouldn't be arguing or trying to uh actually trying to to time the absolute bottom of a bare market low that's something like a $50,000 level given that it was at 125 126 for the peak of the cycle is a very satisfying and very good entry that affords us the ability to accumulate a lot more bitcoin point over time. Now, you may be asking, what if it doesn't get down there? And that's a good question. I think it's again more about watching this unfold over time, remaining diligent, remaining patient, and waiting for this to get back into the window or get into the window and looking at this the structure and the character of the market at that point to see if there's any signs that maybe it's bottoming out. We did have something kind of similar in the last cycle here where it just refused to keep going down and then just made a move up. We're going to look for signs of something similar uh to that. But again, not looking to get super greedy on the purchase. It's just that this initial decline at 50% didn't really meet or reach the levels that you would expect in a bare market decline. It also came very quickly off the highs, just sort of five months off those highs. They're not really in the timing window, but in the subsequent decline, if we get down back towards testing the 60,000 level and we're in this window, we're going to be much more going to be paying much more attention to to adding into positions because we don't want to see this coming out of this area and be left behind with not a full allocation. The last scenario is well what if this is the bottom of the four-year cycle coming in much earlier than the window which is an outside everything is always an outside possibility there's no such thing in my opinion in investing of not possible again I give it less or little weight of a possibility but it's there and I think that's a matter of seeing if it can get back up to that 10-month moving average and if it can if it slices through that and continues and closes a monthly candle above that and gets closer towards 100,000 level then yeah we don't want to be sort of left behind saying uh I I so firmly believe that it has to come back down in Q3 and make that low there's going to be I think an opportunity to start to get exposure back so yeah I mean I think this is a a fairly short report compared to the prior ones and again mostly a function of the fact that you can't argue with this being in a bare market I think I still see a lot of people saying it's not a bare market We're down 50%. Equity markets at all-time highs. Every reason for this to be bullish. The environment that a lot of Bitcoiners were hoping for, the acceptance, the regulation and so on and traditional finance, it's all there right now. Yet, it languishes here. And again, I think we have to respect the fact that it is a bare market. And not to get necessarily fooled by one big green candle that is certainly overdue at this point. I think that would be again just a counter trend move before resumption of the decline. The good news overall is you know if you've been following along now for I guess close to seven eight years that what wins in the end is just a lot of patience and just uh not getting too emotional about this and waiting for the right opportunities and waiting for the right timing and you're not going to top you're not going to time the tops perfectly. You're not going to time the bottoms perfectly. You want to capture the the meat of every move, the 80% of those moves, and over time from a compounding perspective, it should work out really well. So that's the goal here. A little more patience. I think we can expect some upside, but again, disclaimer there. It's a bare market, right? So we don't have to have the we don't have to get that sort of counter trend move back to that level.

[00:20:20]Uh especially because it's acting weak.

[00:20:22]the risk is always in a bare market to the downside and that is something we need to be mindful of. But yes, until the next report which hopefully gets us a lot closer to those bare market lows, um be well and wishing you all the best.