Bitcoin just lost about a sixth of its value in four days, sliding to its lowest level since July. If its four-year cycle holds, the selling is running short on time.

From Wednesday afternoon to its low Saturday night near $62,000, bitcoin (BTC-USD) fell about 17%, erasing roughly $250 billion in market value, according to Yahoo Finance calculations. At that low it was down about half from its record. It also slipped below its 200-day moving average, a long-term trend line traders watch closely.

Scott Melker, host of The Daily Wolf, used to think the cycle was dead.

"I was actually a deep believer that the four-year cycle was over," Melker told Yahoo Finance at its Invest conference Thursday.

But bitcoin "topped almost to the day of when any four-year cycle predictor would have [pointed to]," he said, and the yearlong slide since then "really does align."

The clock is based on the halving, which cuts the reward for mining new bitcoin in half about every four years and slows the coin's supply growth. The last four came in 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024, all presidential election years. Each cycle's record followed 12 to 18 months later.

The peaks have arrived on a near-identical schedule. Bitcoin's October 2025 record came 1,426 days after its November 2021 peak, according to Yahoo Finance calculations using CoinMarketCap data. The two peaks before that were 1,424 days apart.

The last three bear markets bottomed 12 to 13 months after the peak, the same pattern that showed up when the Binance hack knocked $100 billion off crypto. Bitcoin just passed 13 months since its Oct. 6, 2025 record.

Five-year line chart of bitcoin's price with its 40-week moving average. It shows the fall from the late-2021 peak to a low near $16,000 in late 2022, the climb to a record above $120,000 in October 2025, and the decline since then. Dashed lines mark the September 2026 high near $87,000 and the July 2026 low near $57,700.

Yahoo Finance AlphaSpace

This cycle has already gone off script once.

Bitcoin's lowest price so far came July 1, near $57,750. That was just nine months after the peak, and 54% below the record. Past bear markets cut far deeper, by 77% to 85%. If July was the bottom, this was the shortest and shallowest bitcoin bear market yet.

That leaves two paths. Bitcoin could revisit the early July low, about 7% below Saturday's low, and turn from there. Or July was the bottom, and the latest slide ends at a higher low. Either way, if the cycle holds, the calendar points to a turn in the coming weeks or months.

Bar chart of bitcoin's declines from record high to low: 85% in 2013-15, 84% in 2017-18, 77% in 2021-22 and 54% in 2025-26 so far.

CoinMarketCap, Yahoo Finance

The midterm elections line up too. Each of the last three bear-market lows came within about 10 weeks after a midterm vote, and this year's was early November. In the year after each of those lows, bitcoin more than doubled.

Still, three cycles is a small sample, and the pattern has broken before. In March 2024, bitcoin set a record ahead of that year's halving, a first.

Five-year line chart of bitcoin's price with its 40-week moving average. It shows the fall from the late-2021 peak to a low near $16,000 in late 2022, the climb to a record above $120,000 in October 2025, and the decline since. Dashed lines mark the September 2026 high near $87,000 and the June 2026 low near $58,600.

Yahoo Finance AlphaSpace

The levels to watch are on the chart. The green line marks the July low near $57,750, and a definitive break below it would mean this bear market is running deeper than the cycle suggests. The red line marks September's high near $87,000, which bitcoin would need to clear to put its comeback back on track.

Melker expects the rebound sooner rather than later. If the cycle is intact, "it would indicate that in the coming months, we'll start to see bitcoin really ramp up," he said. "The news tends to follow the chart rather than otherwise. There's no greater marketing for an asset than higher prices."

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5922790&forum_id=2#50260580)