What Bitcoin's own price says about the cycle

The Market Lab builds a composite cycle score out of price technicals alone — no blockchain data, no sentiment surveys, nothing but Bitcoin's own price history and what can be derived from it. Six factors are each scored 0–10 against their full observed history, then equal-weighted into a single reading.

The point of a lab rather than a fixed chart is that you can take factors out. If a composite only looks convincing with every input switched on, that is worth knowing. Toggling factors and replaying history is how you find out which ones are carrying the signal and which are along for the ride.

Mayer Multiple is price divided by its 200-day moving average — the oldest and simplest overextension measure in Bitcoin analysis. Pi-Cycle Top tracks the distance between two long moving averages whose crossover has coincided with several cycle peaks. Trend measures the direction and persistence of price relative to its own recent path.

30-Day Return captures short-horizon momentum, the factor most likely to flag a blow-off. Price Valuation Z-Score measures how far price sits from its long-run log-regression fit in standard deviations. Realized Volatility is the odd one out — it does not say expensive or cheap, but volatility regimes cluster, and compressed volatility has historically preceded large moves in both directions.

Every enabled factor carries the same share of the composite. That is a deliberate choice, not a missing feature. Fitted weights on a dataset this small — Bitcoin has produced roughly four cycles — will describe the past far better than they predict the future, and the fit gets more flattering the more knobs you turn. Equal weighting cannot be over-fit, so a reading that looks meaningful here is not an artefact of tuning. The evaluation statistics shown alongside are computed in-sample on collected history and will shift as more data accumulates; treat them as descriptive, not as out-of-sample validation.