A cycle top or bottom is never obvious on the day it happens. This chart shows the three dates behind every cycle pivot in Bitcoin's history: when the confirmation watch opened, when the actual high or low printed, and when the pivot was finally called. It also marks the pivot still pending, and how long its extreme has stood. The gap between those dates is the honest cost of not guessing.
| Pivot | Extreme | Watch Opened | Watch vs Extreme | Called | Days After Extreme |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bottompending | Jun 30, 2026 |
It shows the three dates behind every cycle pivot: when the watch opened, when the extreme printed, and when the pivot was called, plus the one still pending.
Three dates for every cycle pivot, and the distance between them. The first is the day the confirmation watch opened, which happens when Cycle Altitude reaches an extreme. The second is the day price actually set its high or low. The third is the day the pivot was called, once the extreme had held for three weeks.
The three are almost never the same day, and the order they fall in is not fixed either. Altitude usually reaches its extreme before price does, so the watch is typically already open when the real high or low prints. Sometimes it opens afterwards instead.
The shaded span on each pivot is the waiting period: the stretch between the watch opening and the pivot being called. Nothing is claimed inside it. The arrow on the price line is where the extreme actually landed, which is only knowable once the waiting is over.
The hollow circle is the pivot still pending: the highest close so far on a rising leg, the lowest on a falling one. It carries no confirmation mark and no shaded span, because neither has happened. What it does carry is how many days that extreme has stood, which is the number that says whether the wait is nearly over or has just restarted.
The table beneath lists every pivot with the same three dates, plus how many days after the extreme it was called. That wait is the price of the certainty. A pivot called three weeks late is three weeks of not knowing, and the alternative is not knowing sooner but calling pivots that do not hold.
Every date here comes from replaying the rule over the price record, using only what was knowable on each day. It is what the rule would have said at the time, not a claim about what was published then.
The waiting period is fixed at 21 days regardless of how violent the move was, so a sharp reversal and a slow rounding turn are called on the same schedule.
A called pivot is not permanent. If price later exceeds a confirmed extreme before the opposite pivot is called, the leg extends and the pivot moves, taking all three of its dates with it.
The rule is calibrated on a short history of completed cycles, so the thresholds behind it rest on a small sample.
A confirmation watch opens when Cycle Altitude reaches 95 on a rising leg or 5 on a falling one. Once open, the running price extreme is tracked, and every new extreme restarts a 21-day count. After 21 consecutive days with no new extreme, that price and date are called as the cycle pivot.