Wintermute Flags Historic Shift: Bitcoin Bottoms Are Getting Less Brutal

Bitcoin’s latest downturn looks less severe than previous bear markets, with Wintermute noting that BTC is now about 50% below its peak 340 days after the top, compared with losses above 75% at the same stage in 2018 and 2022.

The trading firm argues that Bitcoin’s cycles are bottoming at progressively smaller drawdowns, although it stops short of confirming that June was the final low.

Bitcoin’s Drawdown is Getting Smaller

In its most recent market update, Wintermute pointed to a clear change in Bitcoin’s cycle structure: previous bottoms came after declines of 83% and 77%, while the current drawdown is around 50%.

“Each cycle has bottomed shallower: 83%, then 77%, then 50%,” Wintermute wrote.

The difference is also visible in the time needed to recover. Bitcoin was still down more than 75% from its peak 340 days into the 2018 and 2022 bear markets. Those cycles then needed more than 500 days to return to levels seen around the current point.

Wintermute linked the smaller drawdown to earlier participation from exchange-traded funds and institutional investors. It also said that improving market breadth, with profits from one group of investors moving into another, resembles the early stages of a new cycle.

That view is being tested by current price action, with Bitcoin around $79,000 at the time of writing, up over 2% in seven days and nearly 22% across 30 days, according to CoinGecko.

Remember, last week it absorbed a stronger-than-expected US jobs report without giving up its weekly gains, climbing to $82,400 before payrolls pushed it roughly $3,000 lower in minutes. However, the OG cryptocurrency still finished 3.45% higher and above $80,000.

Although BTC ETFs yesterday saw outflows of more than $46 million, demand for those products has provided another source of support in recent times. They recorded nearly $987 million in inflows last week, their third consecutive positive week, bringing cumulative inflows over that run to more than $3.8 billion.

A Slower Return to Capitulation Territory

Elsewhere, Alphractal founder Joao Wedson has been tracking Bitcoin’s Balanced Price, a metric built from the spending patterns of older BTC that has flagged deep-cycle bottoms in the past. It currently sits near $38,400, although the analyst noted that doesn’t mean the price has to fall back there.

The gap between the metric’s major touches has widened each cycle, from 732 days to 1,120, then 1,200, then 1,420, and the time Bitcoin spends below it has shrunk from weeks to about a single day in 2022. One trader, Killa, expects a new all-time high by November 2027, pointing to cycles that keep bottoming and peaking faster than the ones before them.