Tested claim

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.

Price and its 200-week average$0.03$258k201020182026Price200-week averagewhen it fired
Where we are now. Today price is $79,677 and the 200-week average is $64,713 — price sits 23% 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.
No verdict

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 46.1% of the time.

PER CENT OF OCCASIONS FOLLOWED BY THE PREDICTED OUTCOMEWhen it fired75.0%When it did not46.1%4 occasions — too few for a verdict
Price below the 200-week average, scored against a transition-matched baseline
Times it fired4 separate occasions, not days
What followed75.0% a doubling within 365 days of that close
Happened anyway46.1% comparable days when the rule did not fire
Difference+28.9 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 against a 46.1% baseline, a 28.9-point gap. It is 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.

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.

We are building that second tool. Until it is here, the Where Things Stand page gives the valuation state and what has historically followed readings like today's, with the sample size attached.

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.