Bitcoin's 13–71 Day Post-Midterm Window and Market Outlook
A solo Digital Asset News presenter covers the midterm election's historical market impact, Bitcoin's post-midterm bottoming patterns, the Binance hack recovery, and Hong Kong's new stablecoin rollout.
Summary
The presenter, Rob from Digital Asset News, opens with the eve of the US midterm elections, framing the political chaos as expected and even welcome from a market perspective. He draws on historical data — citing Michael Burry's stock tracker commentary — showing that stocks have consistently rallied in the months following midterm elections going back to 1942, and argues that the same pattern should provide confidence to crypto investors. He highlights a specific Bitcoin pattern: in 2014, 2018, and 2022, Bitcoin bottomed out 71, 39, and 13 days after the midterms respectively — a shrinking window that suggests the bottom may arrive sooner this cycle.
Rob also plays a clip of Donald Trump promising $5,000 to every adult US citizen tied to a Republican election win, and notes community fact-checks pointing out that similar prior promises (including $25,000 checks from tariff revenues and DOGE cuts) never materialized.
He covers the Binance hack, crediting the exchange for covering losses from its own balance sheet without borrowing or selling assets, and highlights the role of the FBI, IRS, and stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle — who froze approximately $2.5 billion in stablecoins — in limiting the market impact.
Rob also discusses a report that Android TV box maker Video Strong embedded malware in the firmware of 1.3 million devices, with Google subsequently banning the company from Android and noting at least 10 million more infected devices were cut off — using this as a broader point that security vulnerabilities are not unique to crypto.
Finally, he notes Hong Kong's new Redcoin stablecoin reaching 50,000 users in its first week with under $100 million in circulation, and its plans to expand into tokenized investment products.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Midterm Elections and Historical Market Patterns
The midterms are upon us, with less than 24 hours to go before election day. And let me tell you, they do not disappoint. As a quick reminder, even though we're in the midterm year and right on the precipice of seeing some major changes in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and governorships state to state across the United States — this is what's about to happen. So don't fret. I know things look a little bit crazy. This personally is what I was expecting and what I wanted: volatility and massive chaos.
This is a good reminder from Michael Burry's stock trackers. He says, "Tomorrow could trigger the stock market's biggest rally." Now, this isn't going to happen in 24 hours, but it could trigger it — it could start, as it's done for the last 50 or so years. He states, and he's right, that President Trump could become the eighth president in history to lose both the House and Senate to Democrats.
Now, this channel is called Digital Asset News. It's not called Politics Republicans Democrats Nonsense Channel News. So I don't really get into the politics. The only reason we talk about midterms so much is their effect on the markets and this little thing called the four-year cycle. But what Michael Burry said is actually correct. What happened to the S&P on average one month after the midterm elections — usually the first Tuesday of the month — you get roughly 2% positive six out of seven times. Three months later you're up 10%. Six months, 17.5%. And one year later, 15.5%.
I know people think, especially around this time, they start to feel like, "Wow, this is it." All the wars that are going on, all the talk of AI bubbles, the collapse of the real estate market, inflation talk, hawkishness — it's all coming right here and we're going to keep going down forever. It's a funny thing how in bear markets everybody believes we'll go down forever, and in bull markets we can never go down and we're going to keep going up forever. That's just not how it is.
And here's what we have — take solace in the history. This was a good one. Stock performance six months after every midterm election going back to the FDR days — 1942 — plus 24% on average six months after every midterm. We can see that even during George W.'s reign, the 2002 midterms still went up 1%, and that was of course during the dot-com crash just getting out of it. So I mean, these days I think we're doing pretty good.
Polymarket and the Political Landscape
So what does this mean as far as politics? We've talked about this before. Polymarket's not a lock, but if you believe your party is going to win or lose or whatever, just go and gamble on it over at Polymarket. And make no mistakes, gamblers — that's what Polymarket is. I know people say, "Well, it's just prediction markets." It's gambling. Straight up, simple. But if you want to do that, things are not looking good for the Republican party. We can see that over time, as far as the House goes, it's really getting bad as far as the pollsters are concerned. But again, things could change. You never know. And there are also Senate swing states — Texas going blue Democrat. That's insane. Anyhow, we'll see what happens.
It's all going to happen tonight. There'll probably be some late counting, so we won't get every single stat in. It'll probably take a little bit of time, but I think by tonight we're going to know who's in control moving forward.
Bitcoin's 13–71 Day Post-Midterm Bottoming Window
Before I get into some of what I think is the good news, I need to talk about what I put in the title before someone says, "Rob, you're clickbaiting me. You said 13 to 71 days and you didn't talk about it." Okay, here you go. We talked about this yesterday, but as a reminder, Bitcoin doesn't bottom right after the midterms — it takes a little bit of time. In 2014, it took 71 days after the midterms. In 2018, it took 39 days after the midterms. In 2022, it took 13 days after the midterms.
What you may notice, though, is that the time is decreasing. So maybe in, I don't know, a week, we start to bottom. But this is the time to really start thinking about not just DCAing, but lump summing. Just going to put that out there. Do what you want with that.
Trump's $5,000 Promise
I still don't know how this is legal. I want you to listen to this clip. It's 31 seconds. Tell me this is legal.
Donald Trump: "I'm going to give all adult citizens in the United States of America $5,000. Democrat policies won't allow this to happen. In fact, the opposite — they're going to raise your taxes. If the Democrats win, you will have an economic depression. If the Republicans win, you will each have $5,000 in your pocket and economic success for our country like we have never ever seen before."
So — $5,000 just to vote a certain way. And you've got to love the community notes on that. The note reads: "The president has previously promised on multiple occasions similar checks of $25,000 from tariff revenues and DOGE cuts." Remember DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency? I mean, it did root out some corruption, but I didn't get a paycheck. However, none of those ever materialized. And apparently when asked about these checks at later dates, President Trump pretended he never promised them. Anyhow, that's what's going on. It's just a crazy time to be around. So that's what's going on on the macro side in politics. Let's just let that go and move on to more positive news.
Binance Hack: A Surprisingly Positive Outcome
The market is really growing up. I didn't see this coming, and I've got to tell you, this is very positive. We all know about Binance getting hacked, and it looks like the FBI came out and said, "Yeah, it's definitely North Korea." Some people are saying maybe it's the government that did it and they're just blaming it on North Korea. Maybe. I mean, nothing surprises me anymore. But CZ comes out — who is not the CEO of Binance anymore, let that pass after his run-in with the law and the KYC/AML stuff — and he says US law enforcement agencies, the FBI, USS, IRS, and more provided vital help in this incident when tracking and freezing assets. Tether and Circle froze a lot — a tweet can't fully express our gratitude.
Many crypto people may not realize that a lot of the reason why Bitcoin didn't drop more goes to them — the FBI, IRS, and honestly Tether and Circle — because they froze like $2.5 billion in stablecoins. Without that, things would have been rather difficult.
But it's not just that, which I thought was interesting. It's this part — and on this one, CZ is right. I'm not very happy with Binance, especially as everything went down on October 6th, 2025, when they had their internal issues, which led to the massive liquidations — highest on record — and pretty much ended our bull market. But I'll give it to him on this one. He's right.
A little something that's not mentioned in the hack: Binance did not borrow money. That has happened before with exchanges — they get hacked and say, "Wow, we lost a lot, let's raise some money or let's borrow some money." Binance did not sell any assets, and it seems like they don't have to. And Binance did not raise money. Binance covered it from its balance sheet. This differs from other incidents that people keep wanting to compare to.
Even me — I always want to condemn these exchanges when they mess up. But when they do good things, you have to acknowledge it. And so far, from what I've seen on X and a lot of different postings and videos, everybody who's been able to take out their digital assets from Binance — and we're talking billions and billions of dollars on their balance sheet — has been able to do so. Before, that wouldn't have happened. Things would have collapsed and we would have been in the throes of the bear. But they did it, and I say tip of the hat — good job to Binance.
Hong Kong's Redcoin Stablecoin
As a quick reminder before we get into the Q&A section: innovation keeps moving forward. It looks like Hong Kong rolled out their stablecoin, Redcoin. People might say, "Who cares about Hong Kong, China?" Well, you should. It's 1.3 billion-plus people. And you can see where innovation is coming from. They hit 50,000 users in their first week for stablecoins with just under $100 million in circulation. It plans to expand beyond PayMe to tokenize investment products. Maybe that's why NASDAQ is pushing so hard for tokenization of assets. And maybe that's why they're telling different companies not to go forward unless they're going through Payward, which is the sister company of Kraken — but that's a whole other story.
Again, looks like innovation is working its way forward. I know people say, "Well, who cares about payments?" Well, you should, because on the rails it could be big. Now, Redcoin is pretty much a centralized, closed-off system, but they're going to be using some crypto rails. And remember — liquidity. We were here first, all the crypto people. So if they want that liquidity, they'll probably go both ways.
It's Not Just Crypto That Gets Hacked
Lastly, as a quick reminder, it's not just us that gets hacked. It's not just us that gets beat down. It's not just us that loses market share. Take a look at what's going on with gold and silver and a ton of different AI stocks today. It's everybody.
Google says Android TV box maker Video Strong infected its own users and sold the access to criminals. They built a backdoor into the firmware of 1.3 million set-top boxes, and if a user deleted it, it just came back on the next reboot. Buyers turned the boxes into residential proxies and ad fraud bots — essentially being served fake ads so they can buy into it, lose all their money, and get scammed. That sounds like something that happened with a company called Ledger and their third-party authorized resellers. So it's not just us — even places connected to Google. And Google banned Video Strong from Android, and says the takedown also cuts off at least 10 million more infected devices. That is a boatload.
Q&A
Bill said in the beginning, "Crypto is dying a fast death." And I was like, "Bill, I think it's actually a slow death." But crypto always seems to die in midterm years. We always feel like, well, there's the bear market, it's going to keep going down forever. It never goes down forever, just like the bull.
What is Rob buying? Well, besides Bitcoin, I'm going to use Kraken for altcoins. Right now Solana is looking pretty attractive, and maybe a little BNB. Look, BNB — like we just talked about — they did a pretty good thing. And maybe Ethereum, but I'm not really hyped up on Ethereum. Tron is looking pretty good. NEAR also. Maybe a little Kaspa and maybe some more AI plays. But I can only do so many altcoins before I get overwhelmed, so I'm just going to stick with those ones I usually talk about.
On the topic of there being no new interest in Bitcoin and Bitcoin having reached saturation — I think right now there's not much interest because it's not about how great the utility of something is. There's a lot of great utility out there. But it comes down to speculation. It's three parts speculation, speculation, speculation, and then a little bit of utility. You pull that together, then you've got a winner of a token. But can it really deliver?
Some products are really delivering. Like, the reason why Tron did so well — and I always get kind of laughed at when I talk about it — but I believe it's in the top 10, I believe it's been around for quite some time, and I believe it really is the preferred route and rail for Tether payments all across much of the EU and mostly Asian countries, Southeast Asia. There's a reason why it went up even during this bear market — because it actually does something.
Once Bitcoin starts reaching new highs, all of a sudden everybody's going to be the next expert and it's going to be like, "Oh, I knew it would come back." Yeah.
Laura says, "Hey Rob, is the channel going to go dormant during the bull run so you can enjoy profits, or is it business as usual?"
No, no, no. So if you might remember, my big master plan was to get out when I sold in the bull market — which I didn't sell near enough of. I actually sold in the bear market. The idea was to sell in the bull, tell you all when I sold, and then just bid you adieu until the bear market came. The bear market came fast. I mean, real fast. From October 6th to October 10th, how much did we lose? Quite a bit of money. The market cap went down — I know we went out of three trillion, now we're somewhere around 2.7.
So this time it's going to be the same thing. Hopefully I can get this one right, or at least a little bit better. I'm going to start selling — but that's a while away — and I'm going to tell everybody when I sell. Not exactly what and how much — that's stupid. But I'll say, "Yeah, I sold." And probably as I DCA in, I'll dynamically DCA out, but in bigger tranches. And then I'll probably step down, and I won't come back until the bear — if I even come back — because you've got to remember I've been doing this for like seven years.
It was fun back in 2021, and it wasn't just because of how much gains we were making — I mean, that part was pretty awesome. But what was awesome was all the new projects that were coming along, how interesting it was, the things that they were doing and the things that they were promising they could do. It gave you a lot of hope that there was real innovation. And almost none of them panned out. It happens.
Now, some days this market is pretty boring. I mean, it's fun to talk to you guys, but it's not like it used to be. It's not like there's a new project coming out that's going to take over telecommunications, or a new project coming out that's going to take over all the payments, or a new project going to come out and help with fill-in-the-blank. Now it just seems like it's a bunch of Bitcoin and macroeconomics and what's going on with the Federal Reserve. Some days I just want to fall asleep. But that's just how it is.
On whether the bottom is in — I don't know. There's a little more clarity now, and look, there's one side that is kind of pretty pro-crypto and another side that's really not big on crypto. But I will say, Bitcoin didn't seem to matter whether it was Obama, Trump's first term, Biden's term, or Trump's second term. It always kept going up.
On the question of nuclear stocks like CCJ — no exposure there, but that would be something I should probably get into. Electricity and energy is probably going to be the next big thing because we sure need a boatload of it for all these data centers, compute, and AI.