Are There Any Bears Left? Or Am I the Only One?

The degens are euphoric. Hodlers are beating their chests. VCs are pumping their bags without disclosure. Even more than usual. Bears have gone into hiding.

The Bitcoin price is on the verge of new highs. People are convinced not just that this is a bull market, but rather, that this is only the beginning.

I can’t find anyone skeptical of this rally on crypto Twitter. Am I the only one left?

Before you conclude I’ve lost my way, here are some reasons I’m skeptical:

• Any new bull market should be led by risky new technologies, not by the 800-lb gorilla. It’s arguable that this happened with the likes of Celestia, Bittensor, and Autonolas. Perhaps. But those tokens are recently underperforming Bitcoin and Ethereum, and that typically doesn’t happen until late in the bull. Higher risk assets like the DeFi names, especially newer ones that didn’t exist in the last cycle, have lagged.
• “Alts” get clumped together into one basket. I prefer to differentiate between those alts that are new technologies with promise, like DeFi was in the last cycle, or the above noted TIA and OLAS vs Memecoins, like SHIB and PEPE. The former rise in the early part of the cycle due to smart money making shrewd bets on the future path of technology, whereas the latter rise in the late part of the cycle as retail piles in. Guess which are rising currently?

• Sentiment is off the charts. Euphoria is at a fever pitch. There are no bears to be found. Family members keep wanting me to give them the green light to buy. Internally, my lizard brain is screaming in FOMO.

I understand where it’s coming from: I embrace cycles as a core part of my investing strategy. But history doesn’t repeat, it merely rhymes. As soon as the crowd believes they have mastered the cycles, the cycles change. It’s simply not possible for the large part of the crowd to play the cycle correctly.

What I see in cryptoland is not that different than what’s going on Tradfi: the big tech companies like NVDA are driving the rally, with some accompanying Memestocks like SMCI. Slap an “AI” label on any company and it takes off.

This is late-cycle behavior.