Bitcoin Indicator Scorecard

30 signals examined, plus 6 of our own · 2 fired often enough to judge · 0 beat doing nothing

Most of these signals describe cycle turns, and bitcoin has had four cycles. A signal that has fired five times cannot be told apart from luck, however clean its record looks — so those rows carry figures but no verdict.

Computed from the daily public snapshot through 2026-10-14, over 5,902 daily closes. Outcome window 365 days; triggers within 90 days count once; a verdict needs at least 20 of them.

• Times fired — separate occasions, not days. A signal true for six months counts once, not 180 times.
• It happened — how often the predicted outcome followed within a year: a 40% fall for a top signal, a doubling for a bottom signal.
• Happened anyway — how often that same outcome followed on comparable days when the signal did not fire.
• Happened anyway — the same outcome on the days the rule could have fired but did not. The unconditional version, with no rule attached at all, is on the base rates page.
• Today — whether the rule is firing on the latest day the pipeline has, and if not, when it last did. The reading and its record sit on the same row so that neither is quoted without the other.
• Still open — a rule that has fired recently has episodes whose 365-day window has not closed. They are excluded from the rates above, because scoring them now would count an unfinished outcome as a failure. Each claim page names how many and when the first one fired.
• Could be — a 90% interval on the observed rate. It measures sampling variation between independent trials and nothing else: not that the rule was chosen after seeing this history, not that cycles are not independent draws, not that thirty-six rules were tested. Read it as the narrowest the uncertainty could be, never the whole of it.
• Edge — the gap between the two. Near zero means the signal added nothing.

Each of these is a question people actually ask. Each page gives the claim, where it came from, exactly how it was tested, and what the numbers do and do not support.

A natural response to two of thirty-six is to want more indicators. It does not work, for two reasons that pull in the same direction.

Many popular indicators are one indicator. Net Unrealised Profit and Loss is market value less what holders paid, over market value. MVRV is market value over what holders paid. So NUPL = 1 − 1/MVRV: not correlated, not similar, the same number written twice, and every threshold on one is a threshold on the other. A dashboard reporting seventeen signals where thirteen are that one comparison — sliced by holder cohort or algebraically restated — has three independent quantities, not seventeen. They must agree, so their agreement is not evidence.

And testing more rules produces more positives by chance. At thirty-six rules, roughly 3.6 would clear a 90% interval on luck alone. A tally finishing nine to seven is inside that. Counting votes is not measuring edges, which is why there is no consensus score anywhere on this site.

None of this says the underlying quantity is uninformative. Market value against what holders paid may well be the most useful single reading on a bitcoin dashboard. It says that knowing it thirteen times is still knowing it once.

what the rule predicted happened it did not the year is not up, so no answer yet

Rules are ordered by how often they have fired. The shape of this chart is the finding. Two rows carry enough marks to judge; most carry a handful, and twelve rules have fired fewer than five times in sixteen years.

Colour is the outcome, never the direction. Since a signal picked at random is right about half the time, showing hits in green and misses in red would smuggle in a verdict the confidence intervals do not support — so the two are deliberately neutral against each other, and only no answer yet stands out.

Episodes are drawn as spans because that is what they are: the shortest here lasted a day and the longest ran over twelve years. A dashboard that draws each firing as a mark of equal width makes a rule that fired three times look as busy as one that fired twenty-three.