Does the death cross mark the start of a bear market?
The 50-day average crossing below the 200-day average marks the start of a bear phase.
This rule has fired 12 times. A 40% fall followed within a year on 7 of the 12. On comparable days when it did not fire, a 40% fall followed 28.5% of the time.
| Times it fired | 12 | separate occasions, not days |
|---|---|---|
| What followed | 58.3% | a 40% fall within 365 days of that close |
| Happened anyway | 28.5% | comparable days when the rule did not fire |
| Difference | +29.9 pts | near zero means the signal added nothing |
Where the claim comes from
The mirror of the golden cross, and treated with more alarm than it has earned.
How we tested it
Trigger: 50DMA crosses below 200DMA. Scored as a top rule: 40% fall 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
Twelve occasions, 58.3% followed by a 40% fall against 28.5%. A 29.9-point gap, the second largest on the scorecard, on twelve observations.
What this does not mean
A large gap on a thin sample is exactly the pattern that produces confident nonsense. We report it and decline to call it.
What would change the answer
Eight more crossings.
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.