In other words, we cannot be just flip flopping, and saying bull market, bear market, bull market.. after every little price move, so I still believe that we remain in out about mid-May conversion into a bull market with a interestingly long correction in the middle.
When I say "bull market" and "bear market" I'm really talking about mid-term uptrends and downtrends that play out over several months. I don't restrict usage of those terms to Bitcoin's long term multi-year cycles.
The 350% rally of early 2019 was an undeniable bull market.
Yeah, but I am not even really saying that the 350% increase was a bull market, but instead that it seemed to be a pretty strong sign that we had exited the bear market and that the bull market had begun. We would not really know if that assessment was correct until some passage of time, and I am still leaning on those facts in my consideration regarding where we are at and whether we had either gotten knocked back into the bear market or that we never had transitioned into the bull market in the first place.
I am merely saying that there is insufficient evidence, so far, that our current correction that has brought BTC prices all the way back down to $6,425 has reverted us to the previous bear market or that we have been knocked out of the bull market.
Of course, all of these assessments and evidence remains tentative because subsequent movements in price can cause a previous market movement to be considered in another light and have to be relabelled.. and that relabelling was no fucking way known in advance, but the subsequent movement ended up necessitating such relabelling.
The 70% retracement since the $13,000s and the chain of lower highs and lower lows (which has still not been broken) is/was an undeniable bear market.
I am not going there... but hey you might be correct, but that surely is not my assessment. Currently, I consider it as a mere correction in a tentative bull market. Surely, I do not consider the matter conclusive, but I still am NOT going to go so far as agreeing with assessments that such price movement is a "bear market" or that we should be creating our expectations of future BTC price movement based on such an assessment of a bear market.. Yeah, I might be wrong, but I give two shits about whether it is right or wrong.. and surely each person comes to his/her own decisions regarding what factors are relevant to considering these kinds of labels and to make assessments regarding BTC price direction probabilities.
At the monthly time frame, there is no obvious break of that trend yet. That's what I mean by saying "bears can rightfully keep repeating we're in a mid/long term downtrend." Until the October and November pivots are engulfed to the upside, they are technically right.
You can give weight to whatever timeline that you want in order to conclude what is "technically" correct or not. My presumptions seem to be based on a bit of a longer time frame than what you seem to be "technically" using to arrive at your conclusions regarding the purported proper label for where we are at, currently.
I believe you are correct that December 2018 was the beginning of another cycle like 2015-2017. The charts have yet to prove it though. For me, we need to break the 2019 highs before becoming too confident in that assessment.
I am not confident in anything regarding where we are going. I am just attempting to suggest where we are at and that the odds seem to weigh slightly in favor of UP rather than down.... Does not mean that we won't go down, but if I am saying 51/49 for up rather than 49/51 for up, there is a difference that might not make a large swaying about how to bet, if I were betting in one direction or another or picking various time lines in order to make such assertions regarding where we are going to be at at certain points into the future, whether talking about 2.5 weeks (like sgbett), referring to the time of the halvening (May 9), the end of 2020 or some other potentially relevant time frame.