Is price below the 200-week average a generational buy?
Bitcoin has never stayed below its 200-week moving average for long, making it a generational accumulation zone.
Where we are now. Today price is $83,094 and the 200-week average is $66,514 — price sits 25% above it. Shaded bands are the 4 occasions the rule fired, the same ones counted in the table below: 2015-01, 2015-08, 2020-03, 2022-06.
This rule has fired 4 times. A doubling followed within a year on 3 of the 4. On comparable days when it did not fire, a doubling followed 45.5% of the time.
| Times it fired | 4 | separate occasions, not days |
|---|---|---|
| Still open | 1 | fired since 2026-06-06; the 365-day window has not closed, so these are excluded from the figures above rather than counted as a success or a failure |
| What followed | 75.0% | a doubling within 365 days of that close |
| Could plausibly be | 36% to 94% | the range the true rate could take, on this many occasions, before you invoke anything but chance; a binomial interval that treats the episodes as independent trials |
| Happened anyway | 45.5% | comparable days when the rule did not fire |
| Difference | +29.5 pts | near zero means the signal added nothing |
Where the claim comes from
Widely repeated in cycle commentary, usually with the four historical visits circled on a log chart.
How we tested it
Trigger: close below the 200-week SMA. Scored as a bottom rule: doubling within 365 days.
Only days the rule could have fired are counted. Consecutive triggers within 90 days are one occasion. The baseline excludes each trigger and the 90 days after it, because the aftermath of a signal is not a fair comparison. No verdict is given below 20 occasions.
What the numbers say
Four occasions. 75.0% followed by a doubling within a year, against 45.5% on comparable days when the rule did not fire: a 29.5-point gap, positive, on 4 observations. The largest positive gap on the scorecard, and it rests on four observations.
What this does not mean
Four is not a track record. The 200-week average also cannot be computed for bitcoin's first four years, which removes the most volatile part of the history from the test.
And it does not mean the threshold itself was chosen fairly. Every rule in this registry was specified by someone who had already seen bitcoin’s history, so the cut-off is fitted to the record it is being judged against. The interval above measures sampling variation between independent trials and nothing else: not the choice of threshold, not that cycle turns are few and related, and not that thirty-six rules were tested in total. Only the forward record, which fixes a rule before its answer is known, avoids this.
What would change the answer
More cycles, and a longer history for the average to be defined over.
If you cannot time it, the question changes
Most of the claims in this registry cannot be shown to beat a coin flip, and several are worse than one. That is not an argument against holding bitcoin. It is an argument that the decision worth spending effort on is how much to hold, not when to buy.
That is what How much bitcoin? is for: what fixed weights actually did in a conventional portfolio, and how much the answer depended on the year you started. For the valuation state today, and what has historically followed readings like it, see Where Things Stand.
Recomputed from the daily public snapshot by fetch/scorecard.py and published as scorecard.json. Method on the methods page; every claim in the scorecard.