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No More Smiling

The smile has been wiped of our (sur)face

Johan Bergman

Mar 31

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On January 7th, we published a piece called ‘Trend Assessment’. At the time of writing, bitcoin experienced a small relief rally from $87,000 up to $93,000 after seeing local lows around $80,000 in November 2025. During this period, there was still some copium left in the market that ‘we might see a similar recovery as we had seen after the Tariff Tantrum from April.’

To be fair, it wasn’t straightforward. It’s easy in hindsight. At the time, we assessed that the Trend was down, but we had some indicators that pointed towards a possible Trend Reversal. In November, we had flagged that we technically had entered a bear market, but every indicator can provide a false signal. The ones that never do are extremely lagging. You have to choose between being wrong sometimes, or being late.

We did clearly state what we wanted to see for the reversal to be confirmed, which never happened, unfortunately.

One thing that we want to double click on is something we wrote in that letter:

We shouldn’t underestimate the “sell the rip” mentality in a downtrend.

In this letter, we’ll show what the ‘sell the rip’ mentality looks like on the charts. We also want to expand the framework that we’re building. Last week, we wrote about Risk Appetite and the lack of it in the current situation. We wrote about downside protection measured by the VIX, and we want to show how that looks on bitcoin native metrics.