Share
Bitcoin is back in the part of the cycle where every chart starts to look like an old chart.
After peaking near $126K in October 2025, BTC has fallen toward the low-$60K region, wiping out roughly half its value from the highs. That’s a real bear-market move by any reasonable standard.
But is it enough?
Investors are now watching late 2026, especially October and November, as a potential Bitcoin bottom window. The argument is straightforward: Bitcoin’s 2017 bull market topped in December and bottomed roughly a year later in December 2018. The 2021 bull market topped in November and bottomed roughly a year later in November 2022. If the latest cycle topped in October 2025, then the historical rhythm points toward a possible bottom around October or November 2026.
That is the ‘November bottom thesis.’
Bitcoin does rhyme with its own history, but it rarely repeats it cleanly. The market is larger now, more institutional, more ETF-driven, and more tightly connected to macro liquidity than it was in either 2018 or 2022.
Will November 2026 become the new low? And will the thesis survive contact with the models?
This article compares June 2026 against prior bear markets, then runs the current setup through several frameworks.
All of the models here are in common use across crypto social media and by analysts like Farside, BlackRock, and more. The simplest model, is also the most seductive: Cycle top plus roughly one year equals cycle bottom.
On that basis, October or November 2026 makes sense. It lines up with the 2018 and 2022 bear-market lows. It also gives the current cycle enough time to move from euphoria, to denial, to forced selling, to exhaustion. With the all-time-high in October 2026, a year later means that despite massive losses in the past year, there’s still room to go down.
This is the strongest argument for the November thesis, but it has an obvious weakness: it assumes the cycle clock still works the same way.
Bitcoin’s market structure has changed significantly since the early retail-driven cycles. Spot ETFs, corporate treasuries, institutional custody, derivatives markets, and macro-driven liquidity flows all change how capital enters and exits BTC.
A one-year top-to-bottom rhythm has been a useful guide so far, but 2026’s Bitcoin is not the same as Bitcoin in 2018 or 2021. While the time analog says November 2026 is plausible, it does not say November 2026 is inevitable.
The next question is whether the price decline is deep enough. Bitcoin’s 2018 bear market delivered a drawdown of around 84%. The 2022 bear market saw a drawdown of around 77%. If BTC repeated either of those moves from a $126K peak, the implied downside would be dramatic.
An 84% drawdown would put Bitcoin near $20K. A 77% drawdown would put it near $29K.
That is possible, but a more realistic model may be drawdown compression. The current cycle might bottom somewhere between a 55% and 65% decline from the peak rather than repeating the full violence of 2018 or 2022.
From a $126K high, the rough zones look like this:
Note that BTC currently trades around the 50% drawdown zone already, and pressed well into the zone when it hit $60K in early June 2026. If this bear market is substantially shallower than previous ones, June 2026 could already be close to the bottoming range.
The drawdown model does not demand a collapse to $20K or $30K. In fact, that would probably require a much darker macro or crypto-specific shock. But it does leave room for another leg or two lower, especially if $60K breaks decisively.
The 200-week moving average has become one of Bitcoin’s most watched long-term bear-market indicators. In previous bear markets, BTC has either touched, broken, or consolidated around this long-term trend area. When Bitcoin trades near the 200-week moving average, the market is usually no longer in a casual correction, but a serious reset.
BTC is already hovering near this long-term support region. If the 200-week moving average holds and BTC stabilizes, then the market may later look back on June as the cycle low, or at least the start of the bottoming process.
But if BTC loses that region cleanly, the November-bottom thesis gets stronger, and a break below the 200-week moving average would likely change the psychology of the market. For the November-bottom argument to succeed in the near-term, it needs BTC to fail at long-term support, grind lower through summer, and enter Q4 with sentiment exhausted.
This cycle has one major variable that 2018 and 2022 did not have: spot Bitcoin ETFs.
During the bull market, ETFs helped expand access to Bitcoin. They gave traditional investors, wealth managers, and institutions a cleaner way to gain exposure. But ETF flows can also work in reverse, and the same ETF flows make it easier for investors to de-risk, and in ways that aren’t always quickly reflected in the underlying Bitcoin ledger.
In 2018, the market was driven largely by retail speculation and crypto-native capital. In 2022, the collapse was shaped by leverage, lenders, exchanges, and balance-sheet contagion. In 2026, the pressure is more institutional and flow-driven.
If outflows stabilize and reverse, June may mark the exhaustion zone. If outflows continue through summer, the path toward a Q4 bottom becomes much more credible.
On-chain indicators add another layer. The current setup already shows signs of stress. A large share of Bitcoin supply is reportedly in loss, and long-term valuation measures are approaching zones that have mattered in previous cycles. That supports the argument that Bitcoin is no longer merely correcting. It is already in a bottoming region.
But onchain data can be misleading if treated too mechanically. In the ETF era, more BTC exposure sits outside simple onchain behavior. That does not make on-chain data useless, but it changes what those metrics mean, and it may be less precise than it was in earlier cycles.
The most tempting comparison is June 2022.
Back then, Bitcoin had already suffered a major drawdown. The Terra/Luna collapse had destroyed confidence. Forced selling was everywhere. Many traders thought the market was already near the point of maximum pain.
They were partly right; June 2022 was a major capitulation event. But it was not the final low. That came in November, after FTX collapsed and exposed how much hidden leverage and counterparty risk still remained in the system.
The lesson is that a market can look deeply oversold months before it actually bottoms. The first major capitulation often clears one layer of excess. The final low comes when the last layer breaks, or when buyers finally stop waiting for another shoe to drop.
The strongest case against the November thesis is that the market has already done enough damage. That’s what Changpeng Zhao of Binance maintains. Some of the evidence in his favor:
And there’s a basic psychological factor at work; once everyone starts waiting for the perfect November bottom, the market may refuse to offer it. If investors broadly expect one more leg lower, Bitcoin could simply base, reclaim key moving averages, and force underexposed buyers back in.
The strongest case for the November thesis is that Bitcoin’s current decline may still be incomplete.
A 50% drawdown is severe, but not historically unusual for BTC. BlackRock finds at least 4 drawdowns of at least that much, while other analysts count 6 or 7.
Prior bear markets went deeper, and we can return to the June 2022 comparison; that also looked like capitulation, but the final low came later. The most plausible bearish version is a compressed bear-market extension into the $50K–$57K region, with a possible wick into the high-$40Ks.
That would satisfy several models at once:
The November thesis remains in play, simply because the current setup has not yet invalidated it.
The most balanced view is that Bitcoin is already in a broad bottoming region, but the final low may not be in.
A reasonable base-case range is $50K–$60K. That captures the 55%–60% drawdown area, the long-term support framework, and the idea that Bitcoin’s bear-market drawdowns are compressing over time.
A more bearish extension would put BTC in the $46K–$54K region. Coin Bureau sees one more drop to put Bitcoin in that range. That lines up with some valuation-based and on-chain interpretations, while still avoiding the extreme assumption that Bitcoin must repeat the full collapses of 2018 or 2022.
A true crash below $40K would require something more severe: a major macro shock, an ETF liquidation spiral, a crypto-specific credit event, or a broad risk-asset unwind. It is possible, but it should be treated as tail risk rather than the base case.
The key level is still $60K. If Bitcoin holds that region, the market can build a case that June was the low. If it breaks and fails to recover, the road to a Q4 bottom opens quickly.
Bitcoin’s cycle history gives the November-bottom thesis enough credibility to take seriously. The 2018 and 2022 lows both arrived roughly a year after the prior cycle top. If October 2025 was the latest peak, then late 2026 is a logical window to watch.
The best conclusion is deliberately cautious: June 2026 may already be part of Bitcoin’s bottoming process, but it has not yet killed the November thesis. Bitcoin does not need to repeat 2018 or 2022 exactly for the analogy to matter. It only needs to rhyme enough to keep traders cautious until Q4.
Share
preferred on
