Does the Pi Cycle Top indicator work?
When the 111-day moving average crosses above twice the 350-day moving average, bitcoin is at a cycle top.
This rule has fired 5 times. A 40% fall followed within a year on all 5. On comparable days when it did not fire, a 40% fall followed 25.9% of the time.
| Times it fired | 5 | separate occasions, not days |
|---|---|---|
| What followed | 100.0% | a 40% fall within 365 days of that close |
| Happened anyway | 25.9% | comparable days when the rule did not fire |
| Difference | +74.1 pts | near zero means the signal added nothing |
Where the claim comes from
Popularised by Philip Swift in 2019. It is probably the single most-cited top signal in Bitcoin, and its appeal is that it has never produced a false positive.
How we tested it
Trigger: 111DMA > 2 x 350DMA. Scored as a top rule: did a 40% fall from that day's close follow 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
This is the row people will quote at us, so it is worth being exact. Five firings, five cycle tops, against a baseline of 25.9%. That is a striking record and it is also five observations. Five is not enough to distinguish skill from luck at any conventional standard, and the honest answer is that we do not know. A rule that fires once a cycle in an asset with four cycles cannot be evaluated, however clean it looks.
What this does not mean
This is not evidence that Pi Cycle fails. It is evidence that the question is currently unanswerable. Anyone quoting the 100% is quoting a sample of five.
What would change the answer
Roughly fifteen more firings, which at one per cycle means several more decades. Or a specification that fires far more often while making the same claim.
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.