Final Countdown: Is It All Priced In?

Bitcoin's halving event is now mere hours away. This event that happens every four years has always resulted in new all time highs within 12-16 months. Is it different this time?!

Here’s the good news: if we go by UTC, Bitcoin’s halving will actually be a few minutes into April 20th… So 420. Laughter ensues…

Here’s the bad news: unless BTC puts on another 4 and a half stacks in the next 5 hours, we’re not going to get a USD price of “69” thousand dollars at the halving.

No double-meme halving event. That’s quite alright.

The question now is the same question Bitcoiners and Bitcoin-antagonists alike had back in 2020 - how is it all not priced in? The simple answer is, it probably is. The more complex answer is, it never is.

Okay, so tHiS TiME iS dIFFeReNT itself is a meme. But it might actually be different this time. Why? We have the spot ETFs and the new high already happened - each of these make this time different. However, just because it’s different this time, it does not mean that we’ve already seen the peak for this cycle. Consider what followed the 2020 halving:

Here we see the new all time high didn’t come until about 7 months after the halving. But it took almost another year before we had the cycle peak. This time, the new high came about two months before the halving. We don’t know how many months it will take before the peak price. Remember, the halving is fundamentally a slashing of supply. If demand remains constant, it creates upside price pressure.

Potentially important: it’s also different this time because we don’t have stimmies and capital allocators have a 5% “risk free” rate from t-bills to compete with all other risk assets.

All that being said, as I have laid out for the last two weeks through my various Bitcoin posts, this asset is and always has moved primarily on speculation not fundamentals. Accepting that, there are a few multiples we can look at to use as a guide for determining what the peak price is this time around.

Bitcoin Indicators To Watch

Stock to Flow has been a bit contentious in the Bitcoin community over the last couple years. Primarily because the divergence from the model became so far removed from the expected price for most of Crypto Winter. Well, price is back in line with the model:

Interestingly, the model price today is just $51k - meaning, BTC is actually now trading at a fairly large premium to the implied price from the Stock to Flow model. It’s hard to make it out from the chart, but the model is actually pricing a $450k BTC price in the second half of 2025 - which would make Bitcoin nearly a 7x from current levels.

This is exciting, but it’s important to look at these things with a healthy dose of skepticism. Stock to Flow flat out didn’t work for most of 2022 and 2023. Furthermore, there are plenty of other multiples to consider as well and most of them are indicating much lower targets.

For instance, the MVRV Z-Score:

This takes the market value and the realized value - the average price at which all coins were last moved - and applies a standard deviation calculation to determine when BTC is overvalued or undervalued. The Z-Score, seen in orange above, is currently reading 2.1. We generally haven’t hit the cycle price top until MVRV Z-score hits 7. This possibly implies a BTC price north of $215k if we see Z-score hit 7 again.

Then there’s the Cycle Master:

When looking at this one, I think it’s important to keep in mind that the color bands are generally going higher gradually. The red line is when BTC is considered overvalued. I’m not going to try to predict where these bands will be 12 months from now, but currently the red band is showing BTC overvalued at $113k. The Mayer multiple gives us a similar indication:

This model uses similar oscillators but simplifies it, in my opinion. Red is overvalued - this model has overvalued BTC at $112k as of March - nearly identical to the cycle master reading. Again, I’m not going to try to predict where these bands will be in 12 months, but the trend is positive in all of the them. There’s also the implied premium from MicroStrategy MSTR 0.00%↑:

In the last cycle, MSTR briefly traded at a 6x multiple over the BTC on the balance sheet. At the peak, MSTR shares implied a BTC price of $173k - the coin never got there. We’ve seen similar implied price peaks this time around though MSTR’s BTC multiple has only briefly eclipsed 2x this year. There are some who think this multiple is going back to 6 - I completely disagree, but I do think it’s useful data nonetheless.

Personally, this is what I’m using as a guide:

The chart above shows how we get diminishing returns as the cycles go on. I think this is likely to be the better way to view potential price appreciation. I’d LOVE to be wrong, but I don’t think we’re getting a $450k price next year. What the chart above is showing us is the long term maturity of Bitcoin. As each halving cycle has come and gone, the post-halving cycle top has been experiencing diminishing returns over time.

Consider how each cycle top return is a fraction of the return from the cycle before it:

• First halving peak return: 7,900%

• Second halving peak return: 2,500% (31% of previous)

• Third halving peak return: 600% (24% of previous)

If we continue to see diminishing post-halving returns following the trend from the last three halvings, perhaps it’s reasonable to expect about 17% of the previous return this time around. 17% of 600 is 102. Given that, I think we can reasonably expect about a 100% return for this halving. From today’s $65k price, that would give us a post-halving peak of about $130k.

Keep in mind, none of this means anything “has to happen” the way we might hope or expect it to. Frankly, I think Bitcoin is due for a sizeable pullback from current levels and I suspect the halving is going to prove to be a sell the news event similarly to how the ETF approvals was. How long that pullback lasts and where it goes from there is all just a guess. But if you’d like to follow along with how I’m seeing it, feel free to subscribe if you haven’t already!

Disclaimer: I’m not an investment advisor. I’m wrong a lot. I love Bitcoin and hate it all at the same time. I’m long BTC.