Bitcoin’s four year myth meets its real master: liquidity

Ran Neuner argues bitcoin’s real market cycle is driven by global liquidity and PMI, not the four year halving myth traders still cling to.

Bitcoin’s familiar four year rhythm is not broken, Ran Neuner argues, it was never the real metronome of the market in the first place. In a brisk 17 minute episode of Crypto Insider, the host dismantles the industry’s favorite calendar myth and replaces it with a colder master variable: global liquidity.

Halving as comforting illusion

Neuner opens with a warning that “if you’re about to sell your crypto because you think the recent cycle just ended, you’re about to become the dumb money for the institutions.” He concedes that in the last three halving cycles “Bitcoin did top round about now” in the post halving year, with familiar 80 percent drawdowns that conditioned traders to expect a time based bear market on cue. The halving schedule, he says, gave analysts “three full cycles of data” and a comforting story that “made the market feel predictable,” but “anyone that knows anything about statistics will tell you that three batches of data isn’t a significant sample size.”​

Instead of accepting the pattern at face value, Neuner says he pulled macro, liquidity, equity and political data into “one chart, one model” and found that the halving “definitely played a part, but it was a small factor.” “The real increase in the Bitcoin (BTC) price wasn’t driven by the halving,” he insists, “it was driven by something much, much bigger” that appeared across all three prior cycles and has not yet appeared in this one.​

Liquidity as real cycle driver

That bigger force is quantitative easing and the broader expansion of global money supply. Revisiting earlier bull markets, Neuner reminds viewers that after the first halving in late 2012 Bitcoin’s move from 10 dollars to 1,250 dollars coincided with the Federal Reserve injecting “$85 billion worth of liquidity into the market every month,” eventually adding over $1 trillion to its balance sheet. When the Fed began slowing and then ending QE, Bitcoin slid from about $1,000 to $150, a drawdown that “lines up perfectly with the halving cycle” but was in his telling actually driven by liquidity withdrawal.

He traces the same pattern through 2017, when Bitcoin’s run from roughly $1,000 to $20,000 came as the European Central Bank ran one of its largest bond buying programs, the Bank of Japan “was buying bonds and ETFs at an unprecedented rate,” and China unleashed “the biggest credit impulse in history.” The Covid era rally from $4,000 to $69,000 likewise followed what he calls “the biggest global liquidity injection in the history of finance,” with the Fed expanding its balance sheet by more than $5 trillion while other major central banks followed suit.​

PMI, institutions and the “real” clock

To give the argument a measurable anchor, Neuner turns to the global Purchasing Managers’ Index, which he describes as “the key metric that tracks” whether the economy is expanding or contracting. He notes that when PMI bottoms and then breaks above 50, “that’s when the liquidity starts returning” and Bitcoin historically finds a floor, while readings above 55 have marked the start of the “real bull runs” and levels around 60 have coincided with what he calls the “altcoin super cycle.” In both the 2017 and 2020 cycles, he says, the PMI pushed through those thresholds at the same time that central banks were expanding their balance sheets and crypto markets were going vertical.

“This time the Fed cycle and the PMI didn’t line up with a halving,” Neuner argues, pointing out that for the past two years the Fed has been draining liquidity through quantitative tightening and PMI has been flat to slightly down. That, he says, explains why “it should have been a bull market, but it wasn’t,” and why Bitcoin now trades below where it started the year despite the narrative tailwind of another halving. “The halving clock and the liquidity clock were correlated for three cycles, but this cycle they decoupled,” he says, leaving traders anchored to a calendar that no longer reflects underlying conditions.​

A warning to retail sellers

Neuner’s conclusion is blunt: “We have never entered a bear market in a period where liquidity is expanding. Never, not once in history.” With the Federal Reserve signaling an end to tightening, lower rates ahead and an eventual shift back to QE, he expects the PMI to “start to fly” and institutional algorithms to flip firmly into “risk on” mode. “Do you think Larry Fink has a rainbow chart on his wall?” he asks. “Do you think Larry Fink cares about the four year cycle? He doesn’t. But I guarantee you he’s watching liquidity. I guarantee you he’s watching the Fed balance sheet… and the PMI.”​

Framing the current pullback as a trap, he tells viewers that if they sell now out of fear of a “four year cycle ghost,” they will be “selling your coins literally at the bottom” to institutional buyers just before the liquidity cycle starts in earnest. “The four year cycle was a lie,” Neuner says in his closing remarks. “This cycle isn’t over. In fact, if anything, this cycle hasn’t even begun.”