Bitcoin's medium-term trend is still pointed down — the 50-day average sits below the 200-day. In this regime, buying strength has had no validated edge, so we stand down and wait. This page is how you'll know the moment that changes.
Both framings assume BTC simply holds a flat price while the averages catch up — a modelling device to make the distance concrete, not a forecast of what price will do.
Across 9 years of BTC history there have been 8 completed risk-off stretches before this one. The shortest ran 45 days, the median 88, the longest 389. The current one is at 265 days — already past the historical median.
| Cross | Date | Regime that followed | Lasted |
|---|---|---|---|
| DEATH | 2025-11-16 | risk-off · ongoing | 265 d |
| GOLDEN | 2025-05-22 | risk-on | 178 d |
| DEATH | 2025-04-07 | risk-off | 45 d |
| GOLDEN | 2024-10-28 | risk-on | 161 d |
| DEATH | 2024-08-10 | risk-off | 79 d |
| GOLDEN | 2023-10-30 | risk-on | 285 d |
| DEATH | 2023-09-12 | risk-off | 48 d |
| GOLDEN | 2023-02-07 | risk-on | 217 d |
| DEATH | 2022-01-14 | risk-off | 389 d |
| GOLDEN | 2021-09-15 | risk-on | 121 d |
| DEATH | 2021-06-19 | risk-off | 88 d |
| GOLDEN | 2020-05-21 | risk-on | 394 d |
| DEATH | 2020-03-25 | risk-off | 57 d |
| GOLDEN | 2020-02-18 | risk-on | 36 d |
| DEATH | 2019-10-26 | risk-off | 115 d |
| GOLDEN | 2019-04-24 | risk-on | 185 d |
| DEATH | 2018-03-31 | risk-off | 389 d |
We score 49 crypto majors on trend structure every day. When we split nine years of those scores by this single switch, the result was stark: in risk-on, top-scoring coins beat bottom-scoring coins by about +12.5 percentage points over the next 30 days (bootstrap confidence interval excludes zero — a real, validated edge). In risk-off, the edge disappears entirely.
We didn't stop there: we tested momentum rotation, oversold mean-reversion and weekly reversal strategies in risk-off, looking for any way to keep trading through the winter. Nothing survived. That's why the honest call in risk-off is to stand down — not caution, arithmetic. The stand-down scoreboard shows what sitting out has been worth, and the live track record logs every daily call we've made, append-only.
The 50/200 cross is deliberately slow — it confirms a turn rather than predicting one. So this page also watches a faster pair, the 30/100-day averages, which historically flip ~3 weeks before the confirmed cross. Golden warnings confirmed 73% of the time within 90 days — and 100% (5 of 5) when BTC was already above its 200-day average, versus only 50% below it. Exit warnings confirmed 91% of the time.
This switch has moved only 17 times in 9 years. When it moves, you'll know the same day — with the leaders ranked and ready. Until then, we won't bother you.