Last September, Amanda and I wrote a report about the BTC price cycle, BTC Price Cycle Analyse (PDF). I already have a short keynotes post about it, this one is more about how we got there, step by step.
It started from something many people say, BTC goes up after the US presidential election. And the chart does look like that. From 2014 to 2025 BTC went from about $400 to $115,000, and all three elections (2016, 2020, 2024) sit right before a big jump. So the question is, is it really the election?
Step 1, compare with stocks
We cut the price into one year before and one year after each election, from November 1 to October 31, and did the same for SPY (S&P 500 ETF).
| Period | BTC average | SPY average |
|---|---|---|
| Year before election | 87.44% | 14.03% |
| Year after election | 408.27% | 24.15% |
Both go up more after the election. So we made a simple ratio, the return after divided by the return before, and called it PER (Post and Pre Election Return).
- SPY, PER is 1.7
- BTC, PER is 4.7
If a new government pushes policies that are good for the economy, stocks should feel it too, and they do, a bit. But BTC is almost 3 times more. BTC being higher risk can explain some of it, not all of it. So something else is going on.
Step 2, the halving
Bitcoin makes a new block about every 10 minutes, and every 210,000 blocks the mining reward is cut in half. That is roughly every 4 years. The halvings were on November 28, 2012, July 9, 2016, May 11, 2020 and April 20, 2024. Same 4-year rhythm as the election, and almost the same time.
Same test, one year before and one year after each halving,
| Halving | Year before | Year after |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 141.64% | 287.38% |
| 2020 | 19.39% | 559.27% |
| 2024 | 130.11% | 31.05% |
| Average | 97.05% | 292.57% |
The ratio here, we called it PBR (Post and Pre Halving Return), is about 3.
Then we found this funny one,
PER (BTC) = PBR (BTC) + PER (SPY), which is 4.7 ≈ 3 + 1.7
It is a coincidence, I would not build a strategy on it. 🤣 But it points the same way, the “after election” jump of BTC looks more like the halving plus the normal stock market effect, not the election itself.
One thing in the table I find interesting
Look at the last row of the halving table again. After the 2024 halving, BTC went up 31.05%, less than the 130.11% in the year before. The post-election year was 66.50% (only up to September 20, 2025, it was not a full year when we wrote it), also less than the 98.14% before.
So in the latest cycle, both periods are still positive, but “after” is no longer bigger than “before”. Maybe the cycle is getting weaker as more institutions come in, maybe it is just one cycle. Three cycles are really not many data points.
Risks we listed
- Institutes hold about 34.1% of BTC (Kraken), plus about 5% held by Satoshi Nakamoto, when big holders move, the price moves
- BTC 30-day volatility was about 25% when we wrote it, an all-time low, but S&P 500 was 7.74% (Bitcoin CounterFlow)
- Cashing out is still harder and more expensive than selling stocks with a broker, it is either a crypto debit card, or stablecoin first then currency, with fees on each step
And the biggest one, from Kemp’s The Ulysses Contract, humans tend to see meaning in patterns even when it is not there. A pattern from 3 cycles cannot promise the 4th.
The next halving is expected around 10 April 2028. The full report with the charts and references is here.