It’s Supposed to Feel Bearish
Friday July 3rd, 2026 - Issue # 137
(Any views expressed below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.)
Alright ladies and gentlemen,
Here we are, once again, in another brutal Bitcoin bear market. Usually in bear markets I forget how bad the last one felt, but not this time. I remember. In fact, this one somehow makes the FTX collapse-induced bear market feel like a treat, because at least that one made me feel something. This is much closer to late 2018/2019, where we all just had to sit around and accept that, for the time being, no one wanted to collect magic internet money.
At least most of you have a life outside of crypto. For you, Bitcoin is probably just another part of the portfolio. For me, I’m all in baby, and if I search deep enough into the pit of my soul, I’m still very stoked about the future. Annoyed, yes. Down bad, absolutely. But still stoked.
I have this thing I do during markets like this, and I’m not even joking because I did it yesterday. I force myself out of “no look mode” and open up my Satstreet dashboard with my hand over my eyes the entire time. Then I open my fingers just enough so I can avoid seeing the dollar value of my account, but still see enough to place an order and execute. Then it’s ⌘W and I’m out. It’s the little things.
But these little things are massive in the long run. Buying BTC around or below the 200-week moving average has never let me down. The only thing that ever kills me is looking back and wishing I bought more when it hurt the most. Every cycle I get a little better at this, but honestly, if this gets any worse I may just give my mom my login credentials and ask her to buy for me.
Don’t even bother studying this chart; here’s the TLDR.
Large bitcoin holders have added roughly 200,000 BTC into the weakness. Maybe they’re early, maybe BTC still does something annoying from here, but when whales are accumulating while retail is checked out and everyone is busy calling the cycle dead, I start to pay attention.
And that’s really the whole point of this week’s letter. The annoying thing about bear markets is that the bear case always sounds the smartest near the lows. By that point, price has already done enough damage that every bearish argument starts to feel obvious. Of course people are saying bitcoin is dead again. Of course they’re saying there are better trades elsewhere. Why buy an “unproductive asset” when there’s infinite intelligence coming to market, we’re all going to live to 150, and we’ll be vacationing on the rings of Saturn? Of course they’re saying retail is gone for good, the cycle is broken, and institutions have moved on. That is literally what bear markets do. They don’t just make price go down. They turn emotional exhaustion into seemingly inescapable doomerism.
To be fair, I get it - this market sucks. Watching bitcoin bleed while everything else has been up only and everyone on the internet is bashing our coins and promoting AI bottlenecks is tough. The rotations are crazy as well - hyperscalers, data centers, memory stocks, robotics.
Robotics:
I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t get me excited…I prefer roomba.
I’m sure domestic robots will be a reality at some point but when you really think about it, it can seem a lot further away then what we’re being told sold. And that’s fine. In fact, I’d prefer that. It seems that we have bigger fish to fry before we bring humanoids into the frame.
But this is how markets work, whatever is going up feels obvious, inevitable, and intelligent. Whatever is going down feels broken, embarrassing, and impossible to defend. If AI infrastructure is ripping, everyone suddenly has a “deep research” 12-page thesis on power demand, inference, memory bandwidth, and data center bottlenecks. If bitcoin is bleeding, everyone suddenly decides it was just a liquidity trade, the cycle is over, retail is gone, and there are better places to be.
And maybe there are better places to be. For a trade. For a week. For a quarter. There is always something going up somewhere. However, you’re going to drive yourself crazy chasing all these rotations. There is way too much going on for most of us to trade this market successfully. What most of us will inevitably do is buy the tops and sell the bottoms because the news cycle is outrageous and volatility is high. It’s really hard to build enough conviction to hold through violent moves. It really does seem like folks are playing musical chairs hoping to squeeze out what’s left of this historic stock market run before it ends.
That is not a healthy way to live your life. And you could say, “well I’ll just put it in the SPY & QQQ’s and not think about it.” If you have a very long time horizon I’m confident that will work out well for you but the tricky thing is that putting it into these indices now at all time pico highs is a bit risky. You could find yourself in a slow bleed down only scenario for an extended period of time and it could take years to get back to where we are today. Instead, you could own a capital asset like bitcoin which is >50% off of it’s all time high and is well situated to benefit from whatever central banks inevitably have to do to support this brittle economy running on fumes.
Bitcoin’s value proposition has never been stronger.
And this is why I’m trying not to overcomplicate it. The money supply is expanding, whales are adding, and at the desk we’re seeing the kind of boring bear-market stuff you’d expect to see near washed-out periods: tax-loss harvesting, portfolio cleanup, people trying to make something useful out of a drawdown instead of calling to go long on a new token.
None of that means the bottom is in. It just means this looks and feels a lot more like a normal bitcoin bear market than some grand thesis-breaking event.
This chart is probably the best reminder. Bitcoin has done this over and over again. It gets destroyed, everyone gets tired of it, the bear case starts sounding obvious, and then months or years later people look back at the same chart and pretend it was easy.
In the next couple of years you will be rewarded for your conviction, and for your dedication to buy the scarcest asset mankind has ever known, and they will say you got lucky, or that it was easy.
You don’t get to buy $10 for $1 when everyone agrees it’s worth $10. You get that chance when the market is annoyed, distracted, emotional, and willing to sell you something great because it currently feels terrible to own. Maybe BTC chops around all summer while robots, data centers, and whatever else keep ripping. That’s fine. I’m trying to make sure that when liquidity eventually finds its way back to the hardest asset in the world, I didn’t spend the ugly part of the cycle talking myself out of buying it. I’m not pretending this market is fun, and I’m not pretending I enjoy opening my dashboard right now, or making calls to people who don’t want to be hearing from me. But I’ve seen this movie enough times to know that the moments that feel the worst are usually the ones you wish you handled better later. For now, I’m going to enjoy summer, stop staring at the chart like a psycho, and keep buying when I can.
Have a great weekend and GO CANADA!