DN19 | Six Months In Review

A mid-year review of the framework: what played out, what fought us, where the market sits today, and what we need to see before the bottom can be called.

Welcome to the 19th edition of the Decode Newsletter, and to the halfway point of what has been a genuinely tough year for crypto. When I launched this publication back in October, the goal was simple, to cut through the noise of the crypto timeline and build a grounded, data-driven framework for understanding where we really are in the cycle. Not sentiment, not headlines, but the forces that actually move this market, the global business cycle, the ebb and flow of liquidity, and the long-term structure of price mapped out through Elliott Wave. Six months into the year, this feels like the right moment to stop and take stock of how that framework has held up.

It’s worth stating plainly that almost every macro signal I track has been pointing in the same direction, towards expansion and the kind of risk-on regime that, by every historical precedent, should have had crypto running hard. Gold topped. The business cycle turned. And yet Bitcoin has spent most of the year going quietly nowhere, wedged in a range while equities tear to one all-time high after another. That dislocation, and making sense of it, has been much of the work so far.

In the last edition we concluded that Bitcoin would most likely continue lower in the short term, and over the past few weeks that is precisely what we have seen, with price falling to a lower low at the 0.618 Fibonacci retracement around 57.8k, one of the key supports in the 50 to 60k zone we had mapped out in advance. Today’s update, though, carries a more optimistic tone. On the back of a potential reclaim of the weekly 200 sma, a level that has marked Bitcoin’s macro accumulation zone in every prior cycle, the probability that the low is now behind us is rising with each passing week.

That makes this the ideal moment for this issue. As we cross into the second half of 2026, I want to do something a lot of analysts avoid, which is to hold the framework up to reality and see where it worked and where it didn’t. We will discuss the sequence of rotation we have been anticipating, and separate what played out, from where the market has refused to cooperate. A thesis is only ever as good as its willingness to be measured against what actually happened. From there we take stock of where things stand today, weaving macro and the technical analysis together throughout the article, so that by the end we have a strong view on where everything is pointing right now.

In This Issue

Foundation - The thesis restated, how capital rotates, and why macro and Elliott Wave must be read together.

Signal - The calls that landed, from the Gold top to the ISM flip, and the wave count that held the direction.

Friction - The deeper correction, the broken correlations, and the timing that tested our patience.

Verdict - Why the thesis has stretched but not broken, and what nine months of wave two have quietly put in place.

Position - Working through classic bottom indicators, and an updated Elliott Wave read on the decline.

Resolution - What confirmation of the bottom actually looks like, and the tension between macro and price.