Digital Asset News NFA Live panel discusses Bitcoin seasonality, bare market patterns, and geopolitical surprises
Rob from Digital Asset News hosts a live panel with Guy from Coin Bureau and Ben from Into the Cryptoverse.
Summary
Rob hosts Guy (Coin Bureau) and Ben (Into the Cryptoverse) for a discussion centered on the "sell in May and go away" seasonal pattern and whether it applies to the current crypto cycle. Ben draws detailed comparisons between the current market and 2018 and 2014 midterm-year patterns, noting that Bitcoin has followed a similar structure — February low, higher low in April, followed by a multi-week rally — but cautions that weakness typically returns later in the year. Guy expresses skepticism that old market norms will hold in the current geopolitical environment, while noting the surprising resilience of the S&P 500. Both guests discuss what caught them off guard this cycle, including Bitcoin dominance stalling, the scale of semiconductor rallies, and the ongoing pace of DeFi hacks attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group. Ben also shares that ETF narratives, despite their perceived importance, register almost negligibly on social media compared to the NFT and DeFi narratives of 2021.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
"Sell in May and Go Away" — Does the Seasonal Pattern Apply This Cycle?
Rob: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of NFA Live. I'm joined as ever by Guy from Coin Bureau — Coin Bureau Finance, Coin Bureau Podcasting, Coin Bureau Financial Planning. Guy, how you doing?
Guy: I'm all right, thanks Rob. Yeah, more channels coming soon.
Rob: Thank God. We can't get enough of those. And also the most hated man on Twitter, Ben from Into the Cryptoverse. Ben, how you doing?
Ben: Pretty good. How's it going?
Rob: I mean, I'm doing good. I read the comments over on X and let me tell you, there is no shortage of hatred spewing all over the place. I don't know why people — maybe we'll get into that later. Gentlemen, we have a couple of questions to go over.
Today, there are just a couple of questions and we'll try to get out of here early and maybe get some good questions from the audience. The first one is obviously just like the thumbnail and title suggest — are we here to sell in May and stay away, or sell in May and go away until October or November for the lows, if that's what happens?
I'm going to open this up. I'd like to start with Guy. Guy, can we start with you on this one?
Guy: Sure. I'm sure Ben will have some more interesting visuals to back up whatever he has to say, but all I'll say is we're approaching that time of year — that's snuck up on us, hasn't it? It has me wondering whether the markets, in today's absolutely crazy world, are going to adhere to old norms like "sell in May and go away." I mean, if there was ever a year when everyone could probably do with a nice long break over the summer and get away from it all, this is probably the year to do it. Who knows where we'll be by the end of May given all the chaos that's going on.
As far as crypto goes, we're seeing a bit of a bounce at the moment. I, for one, don't really expect that to last very long. I get the impression it's off the back of a general sense of optimism over the ceasefire in the Middle East — which is holding, depending on who you ask. Some people don't seem to think there is a ceasefire, which is probably nothing. But yeah, crypto is probably going to struggle over the summer. That would be my guess. I'm not going to tell anyone to sell or do otherwise, but monitor the situation, as they say.
Rob: MTS, and that's for truth. And you know what, if you're into TA, you should really be studying hard for the Trump analysis that is going on. TA — I never understood what the chart bros were talking about. Now I get it. All I do is take a look at Truth Social and see what Trump says and just go from there.
Ben, same question for you. Maybe give us some insights into the midterm year selling patterns and what's happening — is everything just repeating again? Are we in the matrix essentially?
Ben: Yeah, I can share my screen and show a few things.
So I think there's some seasonality going on, but there are definitely cases for both sides. Basically, the idea of "sell in May and go away" — well, how has it worked in prior midterm years? I mean, we even had a video back in April or May of 2022 with basically the exact same title, from what I remember. Back then, Bitcoin wasn't even in a rally — it was actually dropping into May. And guess what? You still would have done well had you sold then, because the price continued to go down at least in the short term.
But in 2018, we had a similar rally throughout April — basically up only from the beginning of April into early May. And what's fascinating when we talk about seasonality is how February tends to be a low in midterm years. February of 2018, February of 2014, and of course February of 2022. But then April also tends to correspond to a low — sometimes a higher low, sometimes a lower low. In 2014 it was a lower low in early April. In 2018 it was a higher low in early April.
So when you look at this cycle, we had a low in February and then a higher low in April, and now we've basically just had four green weeks in a row — not that dissimilar from 2018, where we had a low in February, a higher low in April, and then we sort of rallied on up.
Now, seasonality isn't everything. I don't want people to look at this chart and think that means you have to have a lower high occur in late April or early May. Just because it happened in 2018 doesn't mean it has to happen again. In 2014, the rally lasted until early June before we then sold off as the year went on.
One of the things I've mentioned going into this year is how timing every counter-trend rally is so difficult, because no one really ever knows when they're going to occur. Think about this — right now Bitcoin is at around 77K or close to 78K. I'm old enough to remember when everyone thought we were going to bounce at 75K because that was where we found a low in 2025. A lot of people thought we were going to bounce back there, and we didn't. And now we've basically rallied up to the point where people thought we were going to bounce from earlier this year. So it's really difficult to know exactly when the counter-trend rallies are going to occur.
The only other thing I'd say is that if seasonality doesn't really prevail, we are still generally tracking that 2019 blueprint — where you get that roughly 50% drop and then you rally for a while. Of course, the pandemic came in back then, so it's hard to know exactly how it would have played out otherwise.
To summarize: when I look at these charts and how these bare markets have played out in the past, I don't see anything different this time. I just see kind of the same thing so far. Sometimes you'll even get above the 21-week EMA, but this is kind of how bare markets go. You shouldn't expect a bare market to play out in a single direction every single month.
One of the charts I like to use to give me some insight into what's going on is monthly Bitcoin candles switched over to Heikin-Ashi candles. What you'll see when you look at that chart is that most of the time, the Heikin-Ashi candles stay red through the entirety of the bare market, and then once they turn green, the bare market is over. The exception is 2014 and also the 2019 bare market, where you did have a small fake-out in between, but then the bare market still persisted.
So my guess is that we will see weakness later in the year, but I would also guess that weakness isn't going to show up until a little bit later. In 2018, it was about a week after the FOMC meeting — about three or four days after FOMC back then. The Bank of Japan will likely raise rates this summer as well. So I think there are plenty of reasons that weakness will return. But currently we're still in that strength window, at least through the end of the month, would be my guess.
Rob: Good guess. And I got to tell you, that is a lot of fuel for the X trolls — they're going to be loving that later on.
Ben: I like feeding them. I do it for the trolls. I love these guys. They keep things so entertaining.
Rob: Well said. It seems like every bare market kind of plays out the same exact type of thing. I know the thought process is just wait for the 200-day EMA, the simple moving average — wait for the 250, wait for the 300, and kind of go from there. I personally have been dollar-cost averaging every Monday and going that way, and it's worked out pretty well for the last two or three months or so. I might have to take a little bit of profits off the table — that's just one of my rules. Of course anybody can do what they want to do, and maybe we go lower, but right now things are feeling pretty good. It is one of those things, like you said Ben — a fake-out sometimes. Not to say that it is, but as we see looking at the past, we can see it happens again and again. Good insights, gentlemen. I appreciate it.
What Surprised You Most This Cycle?
Rob: Let's move into the second question. This has been an interesting cycle so far, especially with what's going on. Guy's in the thick of it in the UAE, and there's a situation going on with Iran. Is there peace talks? Is there no peace talks? Is the Strait of Hormuz open or closed? What is actually going on?
So when we take a look at this — what has been thrown for a loop that you did not see coming? What happened that was way different, not on your bingo card? Ben, as you were just talking, lean into that one. Was there anything that surprised you?
Ben: Yeah, probably a few things. Some of the things I thought would happen have happened. I'm a little surprised that Bitcoin dominance has just kind of stalled out at the station for basically the entire year — it hasn't really moved. Obviously it's because stable coin dominance has gone up. If you exclude stable coins, Bitcoin dominance is still going up. But I'm a little surprised we haven't seen it move a little bit more.
If you look at it including stables, it's basically just gone sideways since August of last year. I think part of that is the reality that quantitative tightening ended, so that's one reason to not be as bullish on Bitcoin dominance. But the counterpoint is that while that may be true, interest rates are still relatively high. And a lot of times in bare market years, Bitcoin dominance does go up — but normally in bare market years, when Bitcoin dominance goes up, it's after an alt season, which we didn't have this cycle. So I guess it makes sense that Bitcoin dominance is still around 60%. But it wasn't what I had on my bingo card going into this year. I thought that by this point we would have seen a little bit more resolution on which direction it was going to go, but it just seems like the bulls and bears are fighting it out. I don't think anyone had on their bingo card going into 2026 that Bitcoin dominance would just trade sideways for basically the first half of the year.
Also, I was looking at semiconductors — they've had a massive move recently back up to the upside. I thought they might see a bounce back up, but I wasn't expecting them to rally like 40% in just a few weeks. That would be another one.
Beyond that, I guess the trolls would say I wasn't expecting a rally by Bitcoin, but look — counter-trend rallies happen in bare markets. I don't know when they're going to occur. Oftentimes we find lows in late March or early April and then build off those for at least a few weeks, and then the next window of weakness normally comes around as we get into the summer. So I would say that if that window of weakness does not start again going into the summer, that would be surprising to me as well.
One other thing I wanted to mention — I haven't published yet on the website, but I was looking at social dominance and narrative dominance in crypto, to look at how important ETFs have been socially throughout the various social media platforms compared to, say, NFTs and DeFi social narrative dominance. I'm going to make a video about this soon, but ETF mentions on social media — that narrative is almost negligible compared to the dominance that we had with NFTs and DeFi back in 2021. Which is kind of crazy, because today it seems like ETFs are basically what most people talk about when it comes to justifying certain types of Bitcoin price action. But compared to the prevalence of those narratives back in 2021, it's almost like they don't even register. We've had the ETF flows, but they're just not dominating social media the way NFTs did, the way DeFi did. They're just not dominating it nearly the same way.
Rob: Yeah. And you know, I can take a look at the search interest section on the website — I always find this interesting, the search terms for Bitcoin, crypto, altcoins, Ethereum. Of course this is Google, it doesn't tell you how much per month, but just as far as interest goes. We are super low across the board again for Bitcoin, Ethereum, altcoin, crypto. So it'll be interesting to see what you have for the ETFs.
All right. Guy, same thing here — what wasn't on your bingo card? Me personally, I didn't see this nice little rally happening, but I'm happy for it because everybody's at least not so pissed off in the comment section. What do you see, Guy?
Guy: I don't think I'm all that surprised to see a bare market rally. As Ben says, counter-trend rallies do happen. It wouldn't be the first time. I guess you could say I'm pleasantly surprised to see it, but I wouldn't say I'm hugely surprised.
In terms of going back to what Ben was saying about ETF mentions — that is very interesting. My guess would be that people within the crypto space on Twitter probably feel that ETFs are kind of not really crypto anymore. If anything symbolizes the TradFi not necessarily takeover of crypto, but the TradFi co-opting of Bitcoin in particular — and also Ethereum — then it's ETFs. So I would imagine that most people in crypto now see that as a sort of TradFi adjunct to the whole thing. And I guess if you wanted to point the finger at why we didn't get an alt season, spot Bitcoin ETFs are probably one of the big culprits, because they absorbed so much crypto-allocated capital. My guess is that a lot of crypto-native people probably have a fairly dim view of ETFs — either as a centralizing TradFi product that kind of killed the fun of alt season, or both. But it may be more subtle and more complicated than that.
In terms of things I didn't have on my bingo card — this needs some context to work — but if you'd said at the beginning of the year there's going to be an energy crisis unlike anything we've seen, there's going to be maximum geopolitical uncertainty, and yet the S&P 500 is going to put in a new high on just talk of a ceasefire — I would not have believed that. That still surprises me. We talked about this last week, and obviously it's AI that's still driving it, and with AI you just don't know. But the S&P 500 being so resilient in the face of so much uncertainty — that definitely would not have been on my bingo card.
I tell you what definitely was on my bingo card — further hacks in DeFi, further losses to North Korea's weapons program. I didn't know which protocols were going to be targeted, but I knew for damn sure that more money was going to be lost. And I can tell you right now, it's not the end. There'll be plenty more money lost to North Korea and other hackers this year. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the biggest hack of the year is still to come. Because these guys — and by that I mean North Korea, the Lazarus Group — are so good at what they do. It's almost like kids in a sweet shop. I get the impression it's just: who are they going to hit next? So hacking, losing money to Kim Jong-un — that was definitely on my bingo card for the year.
There was one story that caught my eye. Let me share my screen. Something that definitely wasn't on my bingo card was the current crisis potentially solving the fertility crisis.
Rob: Now, this is big.
Guy: Yeah. It's funny because it's condoms, but it does point to something. I think this is an interesting marker of the direction we're going in. We are only really at the beginning of this kind of supply chain issue. There is so much more to come in terms of shortages, disruption, inflation, and prices going up. The talk of a ceasefire is great, and let's hope it holds and let's hope they can get the Strait open as soon as possible — clear all the mines, do what they need to do, and get things running again. But even if that was all achieved by this time tomorrow, we've only just begun to experience the effects of this.
Although the end of the fertility crisis wasn't on my bingo card, I think it says a lot about where we're headed. I also didn't have the President of the United States posting an image of himself as Jesus Christ. That caught me a little by surprise, I must admit.
Rob: Yeah, that was different. And of course he says, "I feel like a doctor — the best doctor of all time, people say." But yeah, it's a very weird, strange situation we're in.
Geopolitical Impact — Supply Chains, Energy, and Life in the UAE
Rob: As far as the supply chain situation you just touched on, Guy — you have family still in the UK, you have friends around. What are they saying about the cost of fuel, the cost of electricity, the cost of energy? Because as I understand it, it sounds like the EU is telling a lot of their citizens, "Hey, we need you to slow down on consumption because there's a big massive hike coming." Is that what you're seeing, or is it something totally different?
Guy: I have heard talk of that. I have heard talk of European governments — especially more progressive ones — being like, "Hey, we may have to do without some of the completely unnecessary luxuries that everyone's addicted to, in order to keep the show on the road."
The UK is an interesting case in point because there's been a cost of living crisis going on there for years now, and also talk of the UK being one of the most exposed nations to the fallout from the Iran situation. So, thanks for that. But yeah, the UK is struggling at the moment. People have been complaining about fuel prices back in the UK for a very long time, and I imagine they will probably go up in time.
What's really interesting — and I was discussing this with someone here, because obviously I'm still in the UAE at the moment — is that we really have not noticed much in the way of price increases here. Obviously we're at kind of ground zero for fuel, so you can still fill the car up for peanuts. That hasn't really changed. But it's very interesting that things like food prices haven't really gone up much, or certainly not that I've noticed. Someone was telling me last night that they're now shipping stuff in via Saudi Arabia — the containers are going to the port of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and then being trucked over to the UAE, which obviously adds a lot of cost because not as much is getting into Jebel Ali, the main port here. But there don't seem to have been any dramatic price increases that I've noticed here. Maybe we'll feel it further down the line, but it's interesting.
Rob: And through all that, everybody is more concerned about how Ben's doing. Stay strong, Ben, for the X counts and everything else.
Ben: I'm fine. My wife's about to — I mean, any day now, like probably within a couple of weeks or so — my wife's going to give birth to our fifth kid. So people can say whatever they want to say. I'll just sit over here and do my own thing.
Rob: Yeah, exactly. And let's just take a step back and realize what's important. That's a great —
Ben: To me, that's the real form of wealth.
Rob: Absolutely.
Guest Wishlist and Audience Questions
Rob: Let's finish this up and get out of here. Ben's got a lot of stuff to do, Guy's got a lot of stuff to do. Guests on NFA Live — if you had to pick one or two, who would you pick to come on the show? I remember one time we had Simon Dixon on and he gave some pretty good background. But who do you want to see on here? Guy, let's start with you.
Guy: If I could have anyone, I'd be really interested to talk to whoever's in charge of the Lazarus Group. I've got some questions.
Rob: Oh, I get a bunch of emails from hackers — I'll send them your way.
Guy: In terms of crypto main characters at the moment, it would be quite interesting to get Justin Sun's take on everything, given that he's at the center of quite a lot of shenanigans. But also two interesting people to talk to would be the AI people — Dario Amodei, who's the Anthropic CEO, who I imagine is probably a little busy at the moment, but that would be fascinating. And Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, who I think is one of the real great minds when it comes to AI.
Rob: Okay. Ben, who do you have?
Ben: Maybe like Bob Lucas — I think he's a good guy. Lynn Alden would be good to have on. And every single one of my haters on Twitter. Bring them all on.
Rob: We don't have enough room for that, Ben. We can't fit a thousand people. I mean, I'd like for them to say it and then we'll look at their track record and see how they've done.
Ben: Yeah, we will see.
Rob: For me, I would like to have Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz. He's big for not just AI but AI and crypto. I think it'd be a pretty good one, and he's been on a lot of podcasts, so who knows.
Guy: I'd throw in another good person to talk to — Charles Hoskinson. Rob, you shared that video of him talking about the quantum threat to Bitcoin, which was really good and really interesting. I've spoken to him before — I did a Twitter Space with him once. He's a genuinely fascinating guy, never short of an opinion or two.
Rob: Absolutely not. And if you're looking for that video, everybody — I believe it was taken down on YouTube for some reason. Charles talked about it, and if you want to find it, you have to go to his X account and watch it. Let me tell you, for the first five minutes everything's good. After that — F-bomb, F-bomb, F-bomb. You could tell there was a lot of stored up energy and it did not disappoint. That was entertainment.
All right everybody, let's take a look at some questions and get out of here.
"Is the bottom in?" — I think we kind of answered that. No one really knows, but things do tend to repeat.
"You still seeing a bottom in May or October — anything change for you?" Ben, I think you answered that.
Ben: I think you could have a bottom in May if it plays out like 2018 — where it just kind of rallies into the early part of May and then has a pretty big selloff. If Bitcoin sells off everything it gained in April and May and then goes lower, it's possible. But I think the base case is probably still later in the year.
Rob: Base case. Someone says "Marty party" — oh, that's because DCA Live is shutting down operations. That's a bummer.
Someone says Elon Musk should come on. Well, that'd be great. I don't know if anybody knows him — got his number on speed dial, let me know.
"Will the Clarity Act pass? Make it a buy." Guy, you guys are really tracking this. I don't think it's going to pass, but I'm wrong every so often. What do you guys hear?
Guy: Maybe. But yeah, I don't think it's going to pass. I don't think it's even on the slate — I think they took it off the slate for discussion and time is running out. So unfortunately I'm a bit bearish on the Clarity Act at the moment. But if I was wrong and it did pass, then certainly it would be very good news. I would say probably that would mean the bottom was well and truly in.
Ben: If the Clarity Act passes in the next few weeks, I would say probably the market has bottomed. I would be surprised if we went lower after that. But hey, this is crypto, so there's always lower to go.
Rob: Always lower to go. Last one — "Is there a golden cross coming up, and is that even a big thing for the TA folks?"
Ben: Are they talking about just the 50-day and the 200-day? Because if they are, the 50-day is like 70K, but the 200-day is all the way up at 85K. So if we do get a cross, it's still going to be like several weeks away.
Rob: Several weeks away to DCA. Everybody should be good. All right everybody, that's it for today.