And Bitcoin? A new 4-year cycle bull market could be underway, based on its power law patterns. There doesn’t seem to be a narrative, but then again, bull markets rarely start with one. pic.twitter.com/trJJ2giWdh
— Jurrien Timmer (@TimmerFidelity) October 16, 2026
Bitcoin’s own price history backs him on one point, because the early-July low of $57,757 printed only about 2% above that power-law floor, almost exactly where the model placed long-term support. Timmer’s longer-range version of the same model points toward $300,000 by 2029, which he presents as a projection and which remains far from a confirmed outcome.
A model that ignores earnings and rates
The power-law model describes Bitcoin’s history as a mathematical relationship between price and time. Plotted on logarithmic scales, where each step on the axis represents a multiple of the previous one, Bitcoin’s growth has followed a fairly consistent curve for more than a decade. Valuation methods built on earnings, cash flows or interest rates play no part in it.
That makes the model a tool for judging whether a crash has broken the long-term trend or simply pulled price back toward it. Timmer’s argument is that this year’s downturn stayed inside the structure. He has also acknowledged in Fidelity’s own educational material that relationships like this can stop working, even after holding for years.
A 54% drop against 80% norms
Fidelity’s March research on the four-year cycle shows that previous bear markets erased close to 80% or more of Bitcoin’s value from peak to trough. The current cycle’s decline from above $126,200 to the July low cut about 54%, a far milder drawdown by those standards.
Peaks and earlier bottoms from Fidelity research.
Fidelity’s researchers noted that a strict repeat of past cycles would place the next bottom around November 2026, several months after the July low, and that date is the hardest part of Timmer’s case to explain away. Timmer’s interpretation implies the market finished its correction ahead of that timetable, which only holds if July’s low survives the coming weeks.
$81,400 holds the trend together
The run from the July low to the late-September high of $87,456 added about $29,700, or 51%, in 86 days, and the trend on the daily chart still points up. The 50-day moving average sits at $81,406, well above the 200-day at $75,874, and the 200-day itself has turned higher after falling through most of the summer. Momentum tells a weaker story. October produced two highs near $87,000-$87,400, every rebound since then has topped out lower, and the last one stalled near $85,000.
The Relative Strength Index (RSI) has slipped to 49, back to the neutral midpoint after topping above 80 during the August breakout. The September price high came with a clearly lower RSI reading, a mismatch that usually warns buyers are losing force, and the choppy October trading followed from it. Volume has also thinned out, so sellers lack conviction, but so do the bounces. One recent candle dipped to about $79,500 and closed back above $80,447, which shows buyers have already defended this zone once.
Levels based on the daily $BTC/USD chart.
A daily close below $80,400 would break the trend for the first time since the golden cross and make the $76,000 area the likely next stop, since that is where the strongest overlap of support on the chart sits. Further down, $72,600 marks the base of the big August breakout candles.
McGlone still sees $10,000
Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, still sees a possible slide toward $10,000 if US stocks go through a major correction. Ki Young Ju, chief executive of on-chain analytics firm CryptoQuant, rejected that scenario and argued that spot ETF demand and the Bitcoin held on corporate balance sheets support a substantially higher floor. Fidelity’s Q4 outlook sits between the two camps. It highlighted the late-August rally, which included a weekly gain of more than 25%, and suggested the quiet stretch before it may have reflected exhausted selling, while warning that the rebound did not guarantee the bear market was over.
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— Mike McGlone (@mikemcglone11) October 16, 2026
Fidelity’s November date looms
For now, Bitcoin looks most likely to trade between $80,000 and $85,000 while the RSI resets, with the rising 50-day average narrowing the room underneath. A hold of that average followed by a move above $85,000 on stronger volume would set up another run at $87,456. The more telling test may come from the calendar, since November is the month Fidelity’s own cycle research flags for a possible bottom. If Bitcoin stays above the July low and its power-law floor through that window, Timmer’s view that the bear market ended early would have survived the period most likely to disprove it.
