Rookie Versus VeteranAnnouncing TBL Pulse, our new terminal giving you access to TBL Liquidity and Johan's on-chain bitcoin chart suite for only $19 per month!
Semantics matter. Using the right words to express an idea or a thought or, in this case, explaining behavior, is vital. I’ve come to the realisation that I’ve not been using the best word possible. It wasn’t wrong, but it was sub-optimal, and we don’t like sub-optimal; I can assure you that. Some analysts use terms like ‘smart money.’ While these words do paint a picture that fits the narrative, they’re not the best terms available. First, money isn’t intelligent. The investor deploying it can be, but even smart investors make wrong decisions. Second, by using ‘smart money,’ you’re implying that there is also ‘dumb money.’ Maybe the most important factor in succeeding versus failing is experience. The more experience someone has gained in practicing sports, conducting business, or investing capital, the higher the probability that they’ll be successful in their endeavors. So, before we move on to the topic for this letter, let’s use Rookies and Veterans to describe inexperienced and experienced investors. While not always the case, it’s more probable that rookies make mistakes under pressure and veterans are less prone to dealing out of emotion or getting carried away by short-lived narratives. Our dashboard is now TBL Pulse. Get TBL Liquidity for only $19 per month!
TL;DR Summary
State QuadrantWe are thrilled to announce that the fully updated TBL Pulse terminal is LIVE, and all TBL Pro members can access it immediately. Not a Pro, want to skip our letters, and just go only for the data? You can now get TBL Pulse as a standalone terminal for only $19 per month. For me as an analyst, this has always been a goal to work towards, and I’m thrilled to have been part of this journey. I’m excited to be able to share the charts that I’m developing directly with you as a TBL Pro member. It allows me to invite you into my workshop and to show projects that are still lying on the workbench, and to showcase concepts that are ready for you to take out for a spin. Below each chart, you’ll find a link to the live chart in our dashboard. Last week, we wrote about bitcoin being in a downtrend. Bitcoin’s price did go up last night after the White House announced a two-week ceasefire, but the current dot moved further to the left, not the right. This means that the Trend score is more negative than it was one month ago. The largest contributor to this intensified downtrend is the ‘Risk Appetite’ category. The MSTR/BTC pair is part of ‘Risk Appetite’ for bitcoin. MSTR has become the embodiment of levered bitcoin with a current amplification rate of 34%. In downtrends, investors won’t have as much appetite for levered bitcoin as they do in uptrends. MSTR lost some ground versus bitcoin in the last few weeks, which attests to investors choosing to de-risk instead of levering up at this point.
Without intending to make a prediction, the probability is high that the market will first test resistance before breaking through on its first attempt. We haven’t seen a real test of resistance since January 14th, when price returned to the Short-Term Holder Cost Basis and got rejected. It makes sense for the market to test the low 80s zone at least once, where it most likely gets rejected, pushing price lower again. In the absence of big exogenous influences like stimulus packages by governments, this is a likely scenario for a bear market that needs to hammer out a bottom properly before moving on again.
ShapeshiftersLet’s get back to semantics. As many of you know, in the world of on-chain data, we label supply according to the probability that it gets sold quickly. Research by Glassnode showed that 155 days is a statistically significant threshold beyond which, when supply is held longer, the chances increase drastically that it won’t get sold anytime soon. That’s where the labeling comes from for Long-Term Holder Supply and Short-Term Holder Supply. Short-Term Holder Supply tends to get spent quickly, but when that supply is held for longer than 155 days, the chances increase that the owner will hold it for hundreds or thousands of days. We’re currently in the process of recreating that research and verifying with our own data and our own node whether those findings still hold today. While that research isn’t fully conducted yet, we do want to get into this topic from another angle. Most of the time, we allude to Short-Term Holders as the investors who buy high out of greed and sell low out of fear. So the Short-Term Holders are the Rookies, so to speak. And while this doesn’t have to be true for everyone, because seasoned holders trying to increase their stack will initially be seen as Short-Term Holder Supply, this is true on average. These investors tend to have ‘paper hands’. The Long-Term Holders are the Veterans. They have been holding for a long time, probably have seen multiple cycles, and don’t get scared very often. These are the ‘dip for ants’ and ‘just another day at the office’ type of people. These are the ‘diamond hands’. Most of the time, these characterizations are quite accurate. But during bear markets, they aren’t. What happens to the labels during bear markets? The rookies who bought the top in October 2025 and haven’t sold yet are now transitioning into Long-Term Holder Supply. But those rookies aren’t veterans yet. For most of them, this is their first bear market, which is a mild one up to this point, too. The veterans are buying during bear markets because they have conviction and they know the orange coin is trading at deep value. They were the ones that sold on the way up and now have cash to deploy again. Steady lads. During bear markets, the freshly bought bitcoin by veterans is labeled as Short-Term Supply, and the rookies are holding some bitcoin that is labeled Long-Term Supply.
With that concept in mind, we’ve created a new chart that isn’t focused as much on STH or LTH supply, but rather on Rookie Supply and Veteran Supply. Rookie Supply ranges from 6 months to 3 years, and Veteran Supply is everything older than 3 years. The idea behind this is that the people who bought the local top after the ETF Spot approval are holding for more than 2 years already, but never really experienced a proper bear market, which still makes them Rookies for now. The score is derived from the amount of spending of those cohorts and calculated using a Median Absolute Deviation. We call it the ‘Rookie Flush’ in this chart. That said, elevated spending doesn’t always mean a flush. Sometimes Rookies take profit after a nice rally. But the times we’ve highlighted are after a drawdown, which hints at a flush rather than profit-taking.
The real bottom indicator is when even Veterans tap out. We have seen it in 2018 during the depths of the bear market and in 2022 after Terra Luna imploded and Three Arrows Capital and the GBTC arbitrage unraveling came to light. When Veterans sell during these cycle bottom formations, it doesn’t necessarily mean they lost conviction. It’s more likely that a bleeding P&L, pressure from stakeholders, or loan covenants force them to sell a part of their stack. And those are typical bear market events. While we haven’t seen a real veteran capitulation spike yet, we are seeing similar signs in the market. Marathon selling bitcoin at a significant loss from their average purchase price to retire a convertible loan and calling it ‘balance sheet discipline’ is one of those signs.
Scary… but trueTalking about cycle bottom indicators. In every single cycle bottom we have seen, the Short-Term Holder Cost Basis has crossed the Long-Term Holder Cost Basis. I hate to break it to you, but those two are currently still quite far apart. STH CB is around $80,000, and LTH CB is around $45,000. What most likely needs to happen to form a similar bottoming formation as we saw in previous cycles is spending more time in the current range. After a while, if we spend more than 155 days in this range, the STH CB will be around $65,000.
There is no rule that the STH CB needs to cross the LTH CB, so it might not happen this time. Our base case is that it won’t cross, mainly because of what we wrote in ‘Supply, meet Demand‘. This is the bear market we never had before. But it would be foolish not to consider the possibility and make sure you’re able to weather the storm if it did happen. If you visit the chart in TBL Pulse, you can toggle off the ‘Spread’ and toggle on the ‘Percentile’. This shows that the STH CB is still 78% above the LTH CB. Historically, that spread is larger 65% of the time and smaller 35% of the time. We know that the longer this range continues, the STH CB will come down just through time, and that this percentile will get lower too. But it shows that we probably have some pain ahead, in terms of time and maybe price.
Filling the gapsThe air pocket that was beneath us when we wrote about the significance of the $95,000 level back in November 2025 is now above us. If the war in the Middle East de-escalates, the market could test where demand and supply meet in that air pocket. As we wrote before, we haven’t seen a real test of the low 80s yet, and this could happen first, before the bottom is fully formed. This chart shows the invested capital instead of ‘just’ the distribution of bitcoin. Currently, 70% of the invested capital is at a loss, up from 75% one month ago.
But for reference, the bottom in 2022 was when more than 90% of all invested capital was at a loss. You can see this in the chart below, where price hit the 10th percentile band when it was trading around $20,000. It even fell below that level after FTX blew up. The label on the right shows that the current 10th percentile is at $49,556. So that would mean significantly more pain. As we’ve mentioned in other letters, a lot can be explained by the fact that price overshot the ‘mean’ in a big way in previous cycles, which lifts up the invested capital at higher levels and makes it ‘easier’ to get really deep in unrealized losses. It seems that we have probably seen the majority of the price pain because multiple metrics are reaching significant levels already. But having said that, it’s not yet as bad as it has been in previous bear markets.
Steady ladsThe data tells us to keep being stoic in this current market environment. Don’t get dragged too far into narratives, into greed when price pumps $2,000 or into fear when it sells off $2,000. It’s probably going to take a while to really hammer out a bottom for bitcoin. Keep in mind that rookies increasingly hold UTXOs labelled as Long-Term Holder Supply that can still be flushed out some more when things do turn south. If that happens, the veterans will probably start deploying real capital to swallow up cheap coins, which will be labelled as Short-Term Holder Supply. Remember that pain is temporary, but glory is forever. Thank you for reading, Johan
If you enjoyed this letter from Johan, consider becoming a TBL Pro to get access to all his charts and research daily (via TBL Pulse) and weekly (via Substack): Thanks for reading The Bitcoin Layer — for access to all content, upgrade to paid!
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Friday, April 10, 2026
Rookie Versus Veteran
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