Is MVRV below 1 a reliable bottom signal?
When MVRV falls below 1 the average holder is under water, which marks a cycle bottom.
Where we are now. Today MVRV is 1.51, against a threshold of 1.0. Shaded bands are the 5 occasions the rule fired, the same ones counted in the table below: 2011-09, 2014-10, 2018-11, 2020-03, 2022-06.
This rule has fired 5 times. A doubling followed within a year on 3 of the 5. On comparable days when it did not fire, a doubling followed 54.4% of the time.
| Times it fired | 5 | separate occasions, not days |
|---|---|---|
| What followed | 60.0% | a doubling within 365 days of that close |
| Could plausibly be | 27% to 86% | 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 | 54.4% | comparable days when the rule did not fire |
| Difference | +5.6 pts | near zero means the signal added nothing |
Where the claim comes from
The counterpart to the top threshold, and intuitively appealing: it describes a real economic condition rather than a chart pattern.
How we tested it
Trigger: MVRV below 1. 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
Five occasions. 60.0% followed by a doubling within a year, against 54.4% on comparable days when the rule did not fire: a 5.6-point gap, positive, on 5 observations. A small edge on a handful of observations, which is noise.
What this does not mean
The economic story is sound and the sample is not. Both things can be true.
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. This is among the more plausible rules on the list and it still cannot be evaluated.
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.