Acknowledgment: Derek Pennings came up with “The Entry Indicator.” I helped him with putting the thought process in writing. You can find him on Twitter @PenningsDerek.
Not Again
It happened. Again. Price dropped more than 50% from its all-time high. During times like these, people wonder whether the bottom is in or not. Nobody wants to sell the bottom. And nobody likes to buy a dip that keeps on dipping either.
There are a lot of indicators. Some of which we call “on-chain” indicators and some are technical price indicators. For example, the relative strength index (RSI) on the daily time frame. When it hits 20 or lower, then it’s really something. Or what about Fibonacci levels? All great indicators to get some sense of price action. But does it make it a great entry indicator? It may be useful, but it’s always relative to the previous price action, which isn’t a fundamental threshold. It’s technical.
article, we explain how we look at the bitcoin (market) price with the realized price as an anchor. When the price of bitcoin goes below the realized price, it means that, on average, bitcoin HODLers are at a loss. Early investors may still be in profit, but most investors are at a loss.
it went a lot lower. Maybe this was because the second peak of the 2013 bull market was an outlier, and the realized price was front running the “normal tech adoption curve.” We might elaborate on that hypothesis in a different article, but for now, let’s focus on an entry spot.
stock-to-flow (S2F) model. It values bitcoin by its scarcity. The deflection is the current price divided by the valuation of the stock-to-flow model. Stock-to-flow became a very controversial model. It probably is (way) too bullish in the long run, because it doesn’t have diminishing returns built in, yet there is empirical evidence that there are diminishing returns in bitcoin.
Image source
But the model could still be very useful. What it does is value the price of bitcoin during a specific halving (expectation). And it is useful to distinguish which period you find yourself in between halvings (time). Even if the expected value of S2F will be proven to be too high, it still can be used in an entry indicator. Why? Because we are creating a ratio and if the S2F price is too high, the “green zone” of the ratio will be lower than if S2F was (entirely) correct.
Percent Of Supply In Profit
With the S2F deflection having both the expected valuation and time covered, we still have to deal with behavior and sentiment to find a great entry point. To get a feeling about what the sentiment is during a correction, it’s useful to watch how many people are under water with their bitcoin purchase. This is possible with the metric of percent of supply in profit, because if 70% of the supply is in profit, 30% isn’t.
Since the bitcoin price has only gone up on a high time frame, one could state that it would be new market participants which have the highest chance of getting in an unrealized loss position. We also know that the younger the coins, the higher the probability they will be sold.Therefore, the probability that new participants are the panic sellers, which sell at a loss, is very high compared to investors who have been in the market longer.
The influence of percent of supply in profit (PSiP) is very important for identifying a bottom and thus a great entry. When the PSiP goes down during a correction and rises again, it means paper hands sold their bitcoin. Chances are that if enough bitcoin has been sold at a loss, the bottom begins to form. The new owners aren’t at a loss and won’t sell the newly acquired bitcoin anytime soon. Typically, these new owners are also investors who have a strong conviction and have been through multiple severe corrections.
If the PSiP is still low and keeps going lower, it means that paper hands still have enough hopium and capitulation needs to kick in before a bottom will form.
The Entry Indicator
Multiplying stock-to-flow deflection (S2FD) with the PSiP gives a value ranging from 0.15 up to one. Only when the market price exceeds the S2F value, the indicator also goes higher, like the blow-off tops in 2011, 2013 and 2014. One could also notice that the bottoms of this metric are forming slightly lower lows over time, which would indicate that the bottom value would be descending over time. The descending of the bottom could be an indicator that S2F valuation is too bullish, but we’ll leave that open for debate.
Image source: Glassnode
When the indicator comes near 0.2, historically, it has always been a great entry point. Note that these buying moments are also shown outside of bear markets. One could see that two buying opportunities are nicely presented in the bull run of 2017, but surprisingly also in mid-2021 and in the most recent one in January 2022.
Dynamics
The dynamics between the S2FD and PSiP is extraordinary. Let’s take January 6, 2021, for example. The market price was $36,850 and the S2FD was 0.987, and thus, the S2F price was $ 37,340. The PSiP was 100%. So every (on-chain) bitcoin HODLer was at profit. The entry indicator (TEI) gives 0.987 times 100% which equals 0.987. So, the price was almost at par. Nobody was at a loss and price was at the expected level for this epoch thus it wasn’t a great entry point.
Let’s look at moments in time when there was a big correction. On August 25, 2015, the price fell to $211.04 while S2FD was 0.578 and PSiP was 36.5%. TEI gave 0.21.
Fast-forward to December 15, 2018, the price was $3,255 and S2FD was 0.463 and PSiP was 40.18%. TEI gave 0.186. Slightly more HODLers were in profit than back in 2015, but the deflection between market price and S2F price was larger.
One could get a great entry during a bear market, but even during a bull market such entries will present themselves. After reaching a new all-time high of $2,991 on June 11, 2017, we pulled back to $1,914 within weeks. With a PSiP of 78%, one could discuss if this would make a great entry. However, the S2FD was 0.35 resulting in a TEI of 0.273. In hindsight, it actually was a great entry point despite being in the midst of a bull run.
The same happened in the spring of 2021. On July 19, 2021, the bitcoin price was $30,834 and S2FD was 0.279, but PSiP was only 65.8%, which gave TEI 0.177. The outcome is almost the same as in 2018 and 2015, but it has a different structure. In 2015 and 2018, the S2F.D was less severe, but the supply at a loss was larger. In 2021, the S2FD was really large, which resulted in a low number, but the supply at a loss wasn’t that ugly.
It looks like there is a correlation between the consensus of bitcoin HODLers about the price in each halving period and the amount of (unrealized) loss they will endure during that halving. In 2015, there was consensus about price being relatively high and when price dropped a lot of supply was at a loss. In 2021, there was consensus about price being relatively low, but it also made sure that supply held wasn’t that much exposed to (unrealized) losses.
Over time, it seems that around 0.2 is a very good entry point and almost every time the actual bottom. Spoiler alert, this time, TEI was at 0.2 at $35,000! Time for an entry?
This is a guest post by Johan Bergman. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
