Does the golden cross start a bull market?
The 50-day average crossing above the 200-day average marks the start of a bull phase.
This rule has fired 12 times. A doubling followed within a year on 8 of the 12. On comparable days when it did not fire, a doubling followed 57.0% of the time.
| Times it fired | 12 | separate occasions, not days |
|---|---|---|
| What followed | 66.7% | a doubling within 365 days of that close |
| Happened anyway | 57.0% | comparable days when the rule did not fire |
| Difference | +9.6 pts | near zero means the signal added nothing |
Where the claim comes from
Equity technical analysis, applied to bitcoin largely unchanged.
How we tested it
Trigger: 50DMA crosses above 200DMA. 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
Twelve occasions, 66.7% followed by a doubling against 57.0%. A 9.6-point gap on twelve observations, short of our threshold.
What this does not mean
This is the closest any moving-average rule comes to a positive result, and it is still not enough to call.
What would change the answer
Eight more crossings would bring it to a scoreable sample, which is plausible within a decade.
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.