Naivety Assumes Continuance — What Five Years of Crypto Cycles Taught Me the Hard Way

​A much longer blog post than usual, one that I hope will be useful for the crypto HODLers such as myself.  Basically, where I reckon we are in the crypto cycle, how I got my own portfolio so wrong, and what I'm going to do about it from here. It's a long read, so settle in.
 
Let me start with a confession...
 
My Bags, and How I Got Them
 
I bought my crypto portfolio back in 2021, with a chunk of my long-term investment funds. It was a classic bucket-of-plenty approach — money spread across a decent number of coins, on the logic that if just a few of them really ran, they would carry the rest of the basket. For a while it did exactly that. I watched the portfolio quickly add 50% in value, then later drop to 50% of initial value, back again into a substantial profit, and down again … and so the cycle went, currently with a portfolio that’s about half its purchase price. I wouldacouldashoulda banked the profits and dumped the not-for-HODLing when I had the chance, with the benefit of my hindsight glasses. Bulls and bears get fed, pigs get slaughtered, as the saying goes.
 
A fair number of those coins (aka the ‘shitcoins’) have since been delisted — gone, and never coming back. What kept the portfolio from being a write-off was the boring end of it: XRP and ETH; the blue chips. Not the clever little punts I was so pleased with at the time, but the two names everyone already knew.
 
That's worth pausing on because it's the whole point of this post. The lottery tickets didn't pay for the losers. The quality survivors carried the junk. That is the opposite of what 2021-me assumed would happen.
 
Naivety Assumes Continuance
 
Here's the thing I've only really taken on board with hindsight. I didn't learn how crypto markets work in 2015 to 2021. I learned how that particular regime worked, and then wrongly assumed it would carry on the same way forever.
 
Think about what those years actually were. Near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing, and then the enormous Covid stimulus on top. Layer all that liquidity onto the steepest part of crypto's adoption curve and a clean four-year halving rhythm, and of course the naive playbook worked. Buy the dip, because it always came back — there was always more money on the way. Hold everything, because the tide lifted every boat in the harbour, even the ones taking on water. Alts follow BTC higher. The cycle repeats on schedule.
 
None of that was foolish at the time. It was correctly fitted to the conditions. The mistake, and this is the line I keep returning to, was treating the conditions as permanent. I learned a regime, not a law. Every rule I absorbed was true in that regime and became unreliable the moment the tide went out.
 
And the tide has gone out.
 
This Isn't a Halving Cycle Anymore — It's a Liquidity Cycle
 
I think a lot of us are still watching the wrong clock. We look at the halving calendar and wait for the script to run like it did in 2017 and 2021. But look at what has really been moving price this time.
 
BTC topped near $126k last October (my last chance to dump the rubbish for a profit) and, at the time of writing, sits around $64k — roughly halved from the high. Here's the detail that should give every "digital gold" believer pause: while Bitcoin was halving, gold went vertical, printing an all-time high near $5,589 back in January. If BTC genuinely traded like digital gold, that could not happen. Under real stress — the Middle East, oil back above $100, sticky inflation — the market made its choice, and it chose the metal. Gold behaved as the monetary hedge; Bitcoin behaved as a high-beta risk asset; and that is what it continues to function as. 

​That's the uncomfortable truth of this cycle. Crypto has been trading on liquidity and interest rates, not on block rewards. And the man now in charge of the liquidity taps is the new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh — a sound-money type who has been open about wanting to shrink the balance sheet. His approach is what people are calling "QT-for-cuts": he may trim the headline interest rate to ease the political pressure, while draining liquidity out the back door at the same time. For an asset that lives on liquidity, the rate cut is the sugar and the balance sheet is the meal. Don't be distracted by the sugar.
 
A Word on the NASDAQ, Because I Watch It All Day. Every Day
 
Those who know me and read my Bluesky posts will know that I trade the indices; I sit on NASDAQ and DOW for my US trading sessions, so this one is close to home.
 
For years the model was simple: BTC was effectively a high-beta NASDAQ. Risk-on, both rallied; risk-off, both fell. But that relationship has been anything but reliable this year. Late last year it broke down entirely — the NASDAQ was making fresh highs while BTC was falling hard, and the correlation turned negative. Then in March-April this year, it snapped violently back the other way, re-coupling hard through the risk-off patches.
 
So, which is it, coupled or decoupled? Both, and that's the point. Over this year, BTC has badly underperformed the index — the trends have pulled a long way apart — yet day today, the two still move together whenever the macro turns fearful. The cleanest description I've seen is that BTC has become a high-beta tech proxy with a bearish twist: it takes the NASDAQ's downside and captures less of the upside. That's the worst of both worlds if you were leaning on it as a confirmation signal. For anyone trying to read BTC off the NASDAQ intraday right now, it is mostly noise until a stable correlation re-establishes.

The Trump Effect — Rules Versus Price
 
Many of you know my views on Trump aka OT, so it pains me to talk about him
 
On paper, this has been the most crypto-friendly administration in history, and it's worth laying out just how much actually changed:
 
- A Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, created by executive order in early 2025, alongside a broader digital-asset stockpile — though built from coins already seized by law enforcement, on a "budget-neutral" basis. No open-market buying. That last detail matters, because it's a big part of why the Reserve has largely fizzled as a price driver.
- The GENIUS Act in July 2025 — the first proper federal framework for stablecoins, passed the Senate 68 to 30.
- Regulators flipped wholesale: new SEC and CFTC leadership, a generic ETF listing standard from the autumn that cut approval times dramatically, and crypto access opened up inside retirement accounts.
- Sixteen tokens formally reclassified as commodities in March 2026, which unblocked the entire ETF pipeline.
- States joining in, with Texas standing up the first state Bitcoin reserve.
 
If you had read all that to my 2021 self, I'd have expected the moon. And yet BTC still halved. Why?
 
Because the same administration's macro policy pulled far harder in the other direction. Tariffs stoked inflation, inflation forced the Fed to hold higher for longer, and higher-for-longer drains the very liquidity that crypto runs on. There is a real irony here: the Fed chair now keeping the taps tight, Warsh, is OT's own appointment. The policy was a tailwind; the macro, much of it his own doing, was a bigger headwind; the macro won.
 
There's a subtler change too, and it's one to keep an eye on. Because the GENIUS Act forces regulated stablecoins to hold their reserves in short-term US Treasuries, the fastest-growing corner of crypto now quietly props up the dollar rather than hedging against it. That's a genuine shift in what a big part of crypto is designed for.
 
And then there's the OT family business, which I'll report rather than editorialise. A Reuters investigation in June put the family's crypto takings at somewhere around $2.3 billion, while ordinary investors lost a broadly comparable amount over the same assets. The TRUMP (should have been called “OT”) memecoin peaked at over $75 in January 2025 and left its early buyers hundreds of millions of dollars down. OT's own financial disclosure listed something like $1.4 billion in crypto earnings, largely from meme coins. His World Liberty Financial venture sold a 49% stake to an Abu Dhabi–backed entity, and launched its USD1 stablecoin just as the stablecoin bill was working through Congress. There are congressional probes running, and ethics watchdogs describing the whole arrangement as unprecedented; the family and the White House obviously reject any suggestion of a conflict of interest; OT wouldn’t shag a fly! (anything else seems to be fair game though). I'll let you draw your own conclusions; I’ve drawn mine. The point for a trader is narrower: a sitting president shaping the rules while his family profits from the same market is now a permanent feature of the landscape, not a footnote.
 
So, the honest read is this. OT rewrote crypto's rules and its legitimacy, but the macro — much of it his own making — wrote the price. The rules are durable and mostly positive. The price damage was liquidity. Don't confuse the two, and don't trade the political headlines as if they move price directly. They move legitimacy, not liquidity.
 
The Lessons Worth Keeping
 
Let me pull the threads together because these are the parts I'm carrying forward.
 
Regime, not law. Everything I "knew" from the last cycle came with an invisible expiry date. The trap now is to make the opposite mistake — to assume this tighter, Warsh-flavoured regime is the new permanent. It isn't, either. The sensible stance is regime-awareness: don't extrapolate in either direction, just watch for the tide to turn.
 
Longevity and upside pull against each other. The most durable asset, BTC, has the smallest multiple left in it. The biggest upside sits further down the risk curve, where survival is far less certain. No single coin maximises both — it's a spectrum, and you choose where you sit on it.
 
Value capture is everything. A busy network does not guarantee a rising token. This is the test my 2021 basket failed completely. Plenty of those projects had activity and a story and no mechanism whatsoever for that to reach the coin I was holding.
 
The bucket-of-plenty logic wasn't wrong — my execution was. "One winner pays for all the losers" is the venture-capital model, and crypto returns really are power-law distributed. But a VC sprays across researched bets, sizes the winners so they actually matter, and then harvests them. I sprayed across junk, sized everything thinly, though not equally (some logic and TA applied), and then held the winners all the way back down. Pure HODL and bucket-of-plenty quietly work against each other: the strategy only pays if you bank the moonshot when it moons.
 
So When Do I Add?
The temptation is to pick a date —  I'll wait for a change in the White House (can’t come soon enough) I should rather let go of that. The thing keeping crypto's liquidity poor isn't the demented president; it's the Fed chair he installed, and a chair's term runs four years, well past this presidential one. The political calendar and the monetary calendar have come apart. Dates are the wrong tool.
 
Gate the decision on the liquidity signal, not the calendar and not your mood. If you might be interested, here's my watch-list for when to turn the taps back on:
- Warsh's balance-sheet runoff coming to an end. The single cleanest tell. Not rate cuts — the balance sheet.
- A real pivot, not a token one. Cuts alongside continued QT is a trap. Cuts with the balance sheet stabilising is the turn.
- The dollar rolling over. A sustained DXY downtrend is a direct tailwind for BTC.
- The BTC/gold ratio bottoming. Gold has led all cycle. When capital finally rotates down the risk curve, BTC starts to close the gap, and you can chart that ratio yourself.
- BTC reclaiming the (can’t believe I’m about to say this …) 200-week simple moving average on a weekly or monthly close. Now, a moving average isn't something I normally use —I'm a Fibonacci-and-confluence trader, not a squiggly line trader — but I'll make an exception here, because the signal is hard to argue with. BTC broke below its 200-week for the first time since 2023 and reclaiming it would be a classic sign the cycle has turned. You don't need to nail the exact low to use it.
 
On the current path those signals look more like 2027 than 2026 to me — but I'll trade the signals, not the guess. And when they fire, I'm not buying one candle with everything. I'll ladder in: scheduled tranches, weighted toward the point where the signals start to line up. You’ll unlikely pick the low, and you don't need to try.
 
What I'd Actually Consider Now
 
This is how I'm thinking about a considered basket, as opposed to my 2021 spray. Prices are at the time of writing…
 
The anchor — Bitcoin (BTC, around $64k). The highest survival certainty in the space: fixed supply, reserve-asset status, deep ETF ownership, hundreds of corporate treasuries holding it. The trade-off is the smallest multiple — the serious institutional targets imply a 2 to 4x from here, not a 100x. It's the ballast, not the rocket, but still with fine upside potential for the HODLers.
 
The one that best does both — Ethereum (ETH, around $1,840). For me this is the standout on the longevity-and-justified-upside test, because its upside is logical rather than pure narrative. It holds the bulk of tokenised real-world assets and stablecoin plumbing, a deep DeFi ecosystem, a spot ETF, and it's the main rail for the institutional tokenisation push. It's also sitting a long way below its 2025 high, so the base is low. The consensus targets are all over the place, which is itself an honest signal — but this is where I'd want the most weight after BTC.
 
The satellite tier, eyes open — Solana (SOL, around $75) and XRP (around $1.09). SOL is the throughput and DeFi leader, with real usage and a live ETF; XRP is a genuine multi-cycle survivor with a payments thesis and, finally, regulatory clarity. Both carry higher upside and a real caveat: value capture. Network usage doesn't automatically become token value — SOL has inflation and fee-capture questions, XRP a large controlled supply released gradually. Small satellite sizing, not core.
 
What I am not doing is going back into the long tail. That's precisely the category that got delisted on me last time.
 
And the meme coins? I'll give DOGE this much: it has genuine longevity. Twelve years, a brand that refuses to die, and now even an ETF. But there's no value engine underneath it — no supply cap, roughly five billion new coins minted every year, no real utility, price driven purely by sentiment. A survivor with nothing actually driving it. Shiba Inu is the same story with a weaker brand and a utility push that isn't landing. Neither belongs in a considered hold, because the entire return profile is mania-timing, and to profit from that you have to sell the top — which is the opposite of holding. If you genuinely can't resist, I'd keep it to DOGE only, money you're prepared to lose entirely, treated as a sentiment trade you will actively exit. Shiba doesn't clear even that bar now.
 
The Rest of My Weekly Screener
 
My Crypto Pick of the Week (re previous blog post) scans a fixed universe — the IC Markets crypto list — and since I’ve only really talked about the names I’d actually hold, it’s worth a straight word on the rest of it. The important thing to understand is that scanning for a trade and choosing something to hold for five years are two completely different jobs. Most of this list is fine for the first and no good for the second.
 
Start with the old guard — Litecoin, Stellar, Tezos and Cardano. These are genuine multi-cycle survivors, now commodity-classified, and Litecoin even has its own ETF. They will not vanish on me the way many of my 2021 punts did. But most of them have badly lagged for years and carry the same nagging question: where is the actual usage? Cardano is the clearest example — a large market cap and a devoted following, but a persistent gap between that valuation and what’s genuinely happening on the chain. Survivors, yes. Things I’d marry, no.
 
Then the ones with real utility, where the honest question is whether the token captures any of it. Uniswap runs the leading decentralised exchange and does enormous volume, yet the token famously doesn’t capture the fees the protocol generates — the fee-switch argument has rumbled on for years. Chainlink is the pick of this group for me: it’s the oracle layer sitting underneath the whole tokenisation story, which gives it a genuinely asymmetric infrastructure case, though with a long-standing lag between how much the network is used and where the token trades. Polkadot and Avalanche are both serious pieces of engineering that have, frankly, disappointed against their valuations in a crowded field of layer-ones. Polygon — the old MATIC, now trading as POL after its token migration — rides Ethereum’s coat-tails as a scaling play, but faces exactly the same value-capture question and fierce competition from other layer-twos.
 
And two odd ones out. Binance Coin is enormous and genuinely useful on the biggest exchange in the world, with a real token-burn mechanism behind it — but its fate is welded to a single company’s regulatory survival, and with a US Senate inquiry into Binance’s role in moving money for sanctioned entities, that is a single-point-of-failure risk I can’t wave away. Kusama is Polkadot’s experimental “canary” network — interesting if you’re a developer, essentially noise for a long-term holder.
 
None of that changes the core of the post. The screener tells me which hourly charts to open this week; it does not tell me what to hold through a cycle. Of the whole list, only a couple even get a look-in as satellites, and you already know which — ETH, SOL and XRP. The rest I’ll happily trade at a clean PRZ when one sets up, but I’m not holding them through the wash.
 
Where Might This Go? The 2027 Institutional Range
 
Needless to say, none of us know for sure what the price of BTC, or any other coin, will reach next year, so I’ll go with the institutional consensus for 2027 — with a strong caveat emptor (buyer beware) that these forecasts vary wildly and have a genuinely poor track record. The banks themselves spent all of 2026 revising down and pushing targets further out, which tells you how much faith to place in any single number.
 
For Bitcoin, the bullish cluster sits around $200,000 (Bernstein) to $250,000 (Fundstrat’s Tom Lee), with JPMorgan’s structural fair-value work in the $170,000 to $240,000 region. The sobering counterpoint: Standard Chartered, which not long ago had BTC on a path to $400,000-plus for 2027, has cut its targets twice and pushed its $500,000 call all the way out to 2030, warning of more pain first. Citi’s near-term bull case is a more modest $165,000. So, the honest 2027 spread runs from a low-five-figure disappointment through a $150,000 to $170,000 base, up to a quarter of a million if everything breaks right.
 
For Ethereum, the grounded consensus across the analyst panels lands around $4,500 to $7,000 for 2027, with the bulls (Tom Lee among them) up at $10,000 to $12,000, and Standard Chartered running $7,500 near-term against a $40,000 target by 2030. The conservative and algorithmic models, by contrast, have ETH barely above where it is now, in the low thousands. That’s a spread of roughly five-to-one between the bear and bull cases for the same year.
 
For Solana, the dispersion is wider still: flat-to-slightly-down around $75 on the cautious models, a base of maybe $150 to $300, and a bull case of $500. Five to seven times, depending purely on which analyst you believe.
 
Here’s what matters in all that noise. The dispersion is the message. Every single bull case above is conditional on the same thing — a liquidity turn, whether that’s a Fed pivot, ETF inflows resuming, or both. And the reason the banks kept cutting through 2026 is that the turn kept slipping. So, the 2027 numbers aren’t really price forecasts at all; they’re a bet on when the taps reopen. If they reopen through 2026 into 2027, the base-to-bull ranges are live. If Warsh keeps them shut, the flat and bearish cases win by default. Which lands us exactly back where the rest of this post already put us: watch the signal, not the target.
 
Timing the Entries — Where the Charts Earn Their Keep
 
Here's the part most long-term holders skip, and it's the part I got wrong for years. Deciding what to buy is maybe a third of the job. Deciding when to add and doing it to a plan rather than a feeling, is the rest.
 
For my trading, I look for PRZs — Potential Reversal Zones, the price magnets where confluence meets exhaustion; buying the dips and selling the rallies. The same discipline works just as well on the monthly and weekly charts as it does on my intraday indices setups. A cycle low is simply a very large PRZ. When I go looking for where to ladder into BTC or ETH, I hunt the same confluence I always do: a deep Fibonacci retrace of the whole up-move stacking with key levels, an ABC FE completion, a prior demand zone, a fair value gap left behind on the way up. Three or more of those overlapping on the high timeframe, and you have a proper zone to build into rather than a hunch.
 
This is what I built eWavesHarmonics (eWH) to map, and its Test Mode is quietly ideal for the job: drop it on the weekly BTC chart, wind back to the 2022 low, and study the confluence that actually marked the bottom. Do that across a couple of cycles and you start to recognise what a real high-timeframe PRZ looks like, as opposed to wishful thinking. For a long-term holder placing laddered entries instead of guessing, that's an afternoon well spent.
 
I'm not suggesting you day-trade your pension. I'm saying that even a decades-long hold benefits from adding at zones the market respects, rather than adding because you happened to feel brave on the day.
 
My Plan From Here
 
So, here's what I'm doing:
 
- Holding my funds for now — but holding because the conditions warrant it, not as penance for 2021. That distinction matters because guilt would keep me in cash long past the turn.
- Watching the liquidity signals above, especially Warsh's balance sheet and the BTC/gold ratio, rather than any date on a calendar.
- Preparing the ladder in advance: a BTC and ETH core doing the heavy lifting, a small SOL and XRP satellite, nothing in the long tail, and the dog coins left where they are.
- Placing those laddered entries at high-timeframe PRZs, using eWH on the weekly and monthly charts, so I'm adding at zones the market respects.
- Dealing with the dead weight — the old meme and long-tail bags — into the next bout of altcoin-season strength rather than selling them into a flat market; and doing it in tranches so I never have to call the exact top again.
 
That's it. No heroics, no trying to be clever. The whole lesson of the last five years, for me, is that every playbook has an expiry date, and the job is to notice the regime has changed before the market charges you tuition for it. Naivety assumes continuance. Experience watches for the turn.
 
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As always, none of this is financial advice — just one trader sharing his thinking with other traders. Do your own research, manage your risk, and trade what you see, not what you think.