Welcome home friends, I hope you’re feeling professionally inspired and socially tickled by your excursion to Istanbullish. To honor your return I’ve taken a break from Tx Action purgatory to try answer everyone’s favorite question. Obviously none of this is financial advice and is intended for internal circulation only.

Defining a Bull Market

Most definitions reference “prices rising over a period of time” and “investor optimism”. Some are more granular, using a yardstick of 20% aggregate market growth over the period in question, wether that be a month, quarter or more.

“Prices rising” is a trend of higher highs and higher lows, which can be gauged using trend following tools, usually some form of (exponential) moving average ribbon like Guppy, Hull Suite and Ichimoku. I personally use a simple 10,20,30 period EMA ribbon. You can also use reclaims of key price levels from previous cycles to differentiate a high timeframe bull market from a “bear market rally”.

”Investor optimism” points to sentiment metrics like google search trends, social media engagement, aggregate stablecoin supply, seasonality as well as more anecdotal hints like media coverage and tone and your “normie” friends suddenly asking you about crypto.

Why bullish? Because reasons

Fundamental event-driven narratives like the spot ETF decisions for now both BTC in January and ETH in December, BTC halving in April and FTX bankruptcy resolution are all good reasons for the market to be optimistic over the next few quarters.

Expected airdrops for prominent projects like Jupiter, LayerZero, Scroll and ZKSync also provide users a carrot to stay engaged - a collective liquidity boost atleast in the 100’s of millions.

Examining the Tea Leaves

Figure 1. BTCUSD 1 Month View - The Bellwether

• Price is up >55% off the lows from 4 months ago, >120% year-to-date.
• Currently trading in a monthly range between $35,050 and $38,500.
• Price could trade back down to previous 1M support ~$31,850 and still maintain the multi-month uptrend of higher highs and higher lows.
• Price has closed above the 10-30 period EMA ribbon for the first time since February 2022.
• We have a bullish cross of the 10/20 and 10/30 EMA’s.
• RSI >50 and trending up suggesting bullish momentum in tact.
• More technical reasons for multi-month optimism than pessimism.

Figure 2. BTCUSD Halving Seasonality Lens

• 2012 corrected 25% within 2 months of halving. Uptrend continuation for about 12 months after.
• 2016 corrected 40% from 1 month before to 1 month after halving. Uptrend resumed for about 18 months after.
• 2020 experienced a longer correction of 72% beginning a year before halving. There is some noise here due to covid panic in global markets. Nevertheless, price bottomed a month before halving and resumed an uptrend for ~18 months after.