The Beginning of the End
Last time I ran this title it was May 2024. In that report on May 8th I forecasted an August panic, then a final explosive rally to mark the top. That’s exactly what happened. The crypto market, for all intents and purposes, put in its top in late 2024 into early 2025. The beginning of the end, right on schedule.
Today, same title but different job.
This isn’t a forecast in the way that one was. It’s a structural timing review on where exactly we are in a massive multi year cycle. This is all about the current setup, and why this specific moment carries outsized weight for the next 12 to 20 months.
Seeing a cycle show up in one market is ordinary. Seeing the same cycle overlay nearly identically across every market and every sector at once is not. That’s what’s in front of us: one large, powerful time cycle that hasn’t missed a beat and is now setting up the exact way it did before the last mania.
The implication is the part people will get wrong. As the title says — we are at the beginning of the end of this major cycle, not the start of a new one. Most will try to trade the next 12 months like a fresh cycle and spend the whole thing confused as to why those strategies aren’t working.
Here’s the timing, the setup, and what it means.
The One Thing Everyone's Missing: Risk is Already Ripping
Before crypto, look at what the rest of the risk complex is doing — because the tell here is that everything else already turned. Crypto is the laggard, not the leader.
Market breadth was the knock on this entire equity bull run. That’s changing fast. The equal-weight S&P against the SPY just put in its best week since November 2020, on a pattern that should look familiar. Historically, breadth expanding this hard signals the wider “everything goes up” phase into the end of a cycle.
The copper/gold ratio bottomed at this exact point in the last cycle — the same bottom that preceded the 2021 euphoria. It’s bottoming again now, 75 months later.
Small caps are on a generational run. The IWM posted its best start to a year since its inception in 2000.
This isn’t theory — it’s already in motion.
Back on June 9 I laid out the rotation from tech into financials and said it would bring the next major wave of capital into crypto. That’s no longer a forecast. It’s happening. Over the last month Financials have been one of the best performing sectors while tech has entered a technical bear market.
Pull up the XLF and you’ll see the exact same story as crypto — a long base, coiled, starting to turn. That’s not a coincidence. Crypto isn’t a software stock and it never was. It’s primarily financial technology in its current form, and it moves with the financial sector, not the Nasdaq.
The setup there is the same time signature as everything in this report. Tech against financials just flashed a major reversal 60 weeks off its 2025 low, with a 60-day, 60-week, and 60-month time factor all firing at once — a blowoff top in tech, a capitulation bottom in financials, same trade from both sides. Financials sit at the fulcrum of the two biggest efficiency waves of this era: AI spending and crypto adoption. When that sector booms, financial technology like crypto booms harder.
The point for today: the macro pieces we’ve been tracking all year long aren’t lining up in the abstract. They’re moving. The rotation has started, the breadth has expanded, risk is bid across the board — and crypto is the last asset still sitting at the bottom of the pool.
Even the boring tells are firing. The JETS global airline ETF — travel and leisure, the classic “people have money and want to spend it” trade — is ripping off its early-2026 low and pushing for all-time highs.
The ISM is tracing the same compression-and-expansion it ran 75 months ago, only bigger this time.
And retail is back. May and June shattered retail trading records. The last time retail traded at this pace was late 2020.
Record equity inflows, record dip-buying, record 0DTE volume — the whole profile of a crowd feeling bold and flush with cash.
And this time there’s a catalyst 2020 didn’t have.
The 2020 melt-up ran on zero rates and stimulus — liquidity with nowhere to go. This cycle has a different accelerant coming: regulatory clarity. The CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May on a bipartisan vote, and the timeline to a final bill runs through late 2026 into early 2027 — directly into the window this whole report is pointing towards. For the first time, U.S. law would draw a clean line on who regulates what, hand the CFTC authority over spot digital-commodity markets, and give developers protection for writing code.
The tell is that this is being treated as the industry’s number-one priority, and there’s a hard deadline underneath it: the November midterms. The current majority is the one driving the bill. Everyone involved knows the window to get it done is now. That urgency is exactly what could force a catalyst across the line inside a shortened timeframe and it lands right when the 75-month cycle says crypto should go vertical.
Risk appetite has been exploding all year. We called it in January. The single laggard, maddeningly, is crypto — a beachball held underwater. Given what I’m now seeing with this 75-month pattern, that’s about to change, and change fast.