You're reading this post because you want to make money.

I'll get to that. By the end of this post, you’ll have charts and analysis that will help you a lot.

First, a shout-out to the legacy financial system. It has done so much good for so many people. You have to give credit where credit is due.

That said, it's odd that so many people get into crypto because they can't make enough money with that system. I guess it's not that good.

As a result, you have to look for prosperity outside of that system. Then, once you find it, you trade that prosperity for more of your government's money.

In doing so, you go back to playing a game you couldn’t win. You lock yourself into a paradigm that has always let you down. You pin your hopes and dreams on a financial system whose benefits flow to somebody else.

The value of cryptocurrency is having a financial system where the benefits flow to you.

When the rich and powerful screw up or rig the system against you, you have an alternative. You control your destiny.

Can't eat a Bitcoin

Let’s say you “win” the crypto market. Bitcoin hits $1 million next year. All of your altcoins do 100x. You sell each of them at the exact peak. You cash out at maximum gains.

Wealth beyond your wildest dreams.

That wealth will forever be priced in your government’s money and exchanged for only whatever your government allows. The value of everything you own will always depend on your government’s monetary decisions.

You will feel like you've won financial freedom, but no matter how much you have, you will never be truly free.

You will remain a servant to an entity that can change the rules anytime. You will never escape those who can freeze, steal, or arbitrarily destroy the value of everything you own.

Mark, are you saying we should never sell our crypto?

No. Do what’s best for you and the people you care about. The two riskiest things you can do with your money:

• Own no cryptocurrency

• Sell any cryptocurrency.

Sometimes, It's worth the risk.

When will I sell?

It's all contained in my plan. Three lines on a chart tell you when to buy, two metrics tell you when to sell, and you'll have my alerts and commentary to fill in the gaps between those extremes.

The Plan

If you follow my plan, you have a strong allocation to the market. You're up 50% at worst, up 2,300% at best, and most likely up 200% with cash to spare.

Where you fall depends on when you started and whether you bought this summer’s drop with new money or money you recycled from selling Bitcoin in March and altcoins at the beginning of April.

This is what you’d have done with Bitcoin since 2023, after buying for most of 2022:

The plan doesn't apply to altcoins, but generally, when Bitcoin's price is in the buying zone, you can buy altcoins, too.

Last month, I started reviewing the altcoins in the top 50. I’ve done 30 so far. You can see the list as I go.

I'll remove that list after I finish all 50 reviews next month.

Wen exit?

You will notice I rarely sell.

If all goes well, you will never sell. You will suffer big swings and volatility as the value of your investments grow until you have a source of durable, lasting wealth you can bank on for years to come.

Along the way, you have the option to sell your crypto. With my analysis, you will know when the market is overheated and giving sellers an advantage, as well as when buyers have the advantage.

No secrets here

Mark, don't you worry people will steal your work?

Some already have. I hope more people do that as long as they give me credit for it.

They won't, but that's OK. You would be surprised how many people do not listen to what I say. They subscribe but don't follow my plan.

Many believe it doesn't work. Some believe it worked in the past, but the results won’t carry over into the future.

For a lot of people, the results seem lackluster. 14 of the 15 tokens in my altcoin reports went up “only” 100-300% after the US election. XLM went up 500% in the same amount of time.

My best performer is up 50x since I recommended it. SOL did 250x over that same timeframe.

My plan misses enough buying and selling opportunities that anybody can criticize it, with good reason. Everybody thinks they have the winning formula.

I remember getting a solicitation for a trading publication that claimed 1,100% returns over a certain period of time. Then, I looked at the returns of putting the same money into ETH over that timeframe.

The passive approach did 1,300%—better than the trader!

Who had the winning formula?

The passive investor, but go tell that to somebody paying $2,000 a year for the trading publication. They'll find a reason to believe they got the better deal.

They may be right.

If you take the “winning” approach, you end up with ETH, not your government's money. The trader ends up with cold, hard cash.

Which would you rather have?

Mindset matters

That's not a rhetorical question. Whether you win or lose depends on what you want to gain from the market.

You feel good about a 1,300% gain until that next 30% drop puts you below the trader. The trader walks away with 1,100% and never has to think about it again.

The choice is not as obvious as it seems.

People say 2021 was an amazing bull market year. Bitcoin's price finished 60% higher than where it started.

If you had bought Bitcoin on any random day that year—in the middle of a massive bull market—you would have finished BREAK-EVEN on your investment.

The average price in 2021 was $47,500. Bitcoin’s price finished the year at $47,777. See for yourself:

Most did worse because they bought the highs, not the lows.

Experts would've told you to hoard cash in 2022 and buy crypto in 2023. In 2022, crypto collapsed into a massive bear market. In 2023, it went “up only.”

Guess what? You should've done the opposite—bought crypto in 2022 and held cash in 2023.

It sure didn't feel that way at the time. Many people still think 2022 was a terrible year to buy crypto.

What about buying in 2023 vs. 2024?

It's easy to say 2023 because prices were lower but remember the circumstances.

Everybody was worried about a crisis or some other calamity. As late as October, one of my polls showed 75% of subscribers expected a global recession in 2024.

Imagine you bought a ton of Bitcoin in 2023 when everybody told you the economy would collapse.

You would have spent the year on pins and needles, biting your nails, stressed and worried.

Your emotional health and mental well-being have value, too. How much is that worth? Factor that into your investment returns.

Opportunity knocks, eventually

People are telling you this is a once-every-four-years opportunity to make a ton of money.

That's not true.

Once-every-four-years opportunities come during bear markets.

Easy money. You buy when prices are low and let the market do the hard work.

That way, when the market runs, you never have to worry about catching up because it’s so far from the peak, you can buy more on the next downswing.

If that seems out of touch with your mood and the vibes in your feed, there's good reason for that.

For content creators, bear markets are hard. Very, very hard. Very stressful. Nobody cares about what you're doing. Nobody's interested in what you have to say.

Samantha Down the Street doesn’t look at her Coinbase balance.  Tony on the TV sounds like a lunatic. Billy the Neighbor isn't texting you for memecoin recommendations.

Once everybody agrees it's a bull market, money comes out of the woodwork—not because we do anything different or better, but because Bitcoin’s price went up.

We get so excited we can't help but transmit that excitement to you.

That doesn't mean you have a better chance to make money now than before. It means I do.

You pay a high price for a cheery consensus

Last year, I ran two separate discounts on my personalized portfolio review and report. They sold out almost immediately. I had to open new spots to keep up with demand.

I ran the same discount again this summer, with fewer spots than last year.

It took three days to fill those spots. I added two bonus spots exclusively for premium subscribers. No takers.

You might say people value my time and expertise less now than they did before, but my time and expertise haven't changed. Some of those spots got filled by return customers. Moreover, my subscriber list is bigger now than last year.

What changed?

Last year, I offered the discounts after the market went up. This year, I offered the discounts after the market went down.

In 2020, I started an altcoin research service. Hardly anybody subscribed.

In December of that year, I posted a warning to prepare for altseason. Crickets.

At the beginning of 2021, after altcoins had gone up 200-300%, I got a deluge of new signups. I closed the service in February 2021 and took new subscribers by request only after making sure they understood they were not getting good prices.

It's hard being an altcoin. When your price falls, nobody wants you. Then, when your price goes up, everybody's trying to figure out the best time to dump you.

Maybe that's why we content creators get so hyped about 2025. It's not because of Lambos. It’s because people care about us again. We see a chance to make money from our talent and expertise rather than hoping our imaginary Internet money goes up in price.

Make no mistake: the seeds of this success were planted in 2022 and 2023. We put in the hard work preparing the soil and sowing the fields.

Today, the more optimistic price projections give you a chance of 2x gains over the next year—if you're lucky and you get your timing perfect.

What if you're not lucky or don't have perfect timing?

If everybody follows the same signal . . .

The gurus make this sound easy. Follow this cycle theory or that data model, and you'll get it right.

Those theories and models are all great but won’t tell you anything about the future. There's no guarantee you will make any money with them.

I explain more in a series of Medium posts, “Bitcoin Cycles and Models: A Realist’s Perspective.”

The metrics aren't as clear as you think. Some examples:

Net Unrealized Profit and Loss (NUPL)

NUPL compares the paper gains people may want to sell for profit vs. the paper losses people may want to sit through until the market goes up. The peaks trend down slightly over time.

On this metric, we’re VERY close to a peak.

The problem?

This metric can stay close to the peak for months as Bitcoin’s price rises. Its levels are so large that a wide range of prices fits the “peak.”

Pi Cycles

These are extrapolations of two moving averages plotted as lines on a price chart. When those lines cross, they mark the big peaks and bottoms—or so the thinking goes. After crossing, they loop around and cross back again, confirming a major peak (not necessarily the “end of the cycle,” however you define it).

You can combine these lines in many ways. For simplicity, we’ll use the classic formula based on the 350-day and 111-day moving averages. You can get this for free on TradingView.

On this indicator, we are nowhere near the top—but the crosses get progressively less clear, the lines make smaller loops over time, and half of the time, Bitcoin’s price went higher six months after a cross.

As a result, should we follow that trend, the lines may not cross this time. Even if they do, we may get a bigger upswing later.

2MA multiplier

According to this indicator, we don't need to think about a peak until at least $220,000.

The problem is, we haven't touched the top of that metric since 2017 and other peaks come well after we cross above it.

Halving cycle

When you look at the chart comparing Bitcoin’s price performance since each halving, you can see we are nearing the timeframe in which its price peaked in three of the four cycles.

In this model, we’re at a timeframe comparable to March 2011, September 2013, March 2017, and January 2021.

Three times, the market peaked within 2-5 months. In 2017, the market went up for 9 more months. Is 2017 an outlier? Or did the other cycles peak too early?

Realized Cap HODL Waves

The short-term Realized Cap HODL Wave bands keep inching closer to the long-term trendline, though we need to fudge for the +-20% of Bitcoins that reflect the shuffling of ETF shares rather than actual intent among the people who hold those Bitcoins.

I went through more of these “peak” indicators in recent market updates and will continue to do this for Crypto is Easy newsletter subscribers.

Embrace Uncertainty

With this newsletter, we don't stress too much about any particular metric or model. We look at everything and plan accordingly.

That includes charts, metrics, models, and anything else that helps us conceptualize our circumstances and decide what to do.

Fortunately for us, most people either don't think about metrics this way or don’t believe that you can get an edge from on-chain data, technical analysis, psychological frameworks, and knowledge of the crypto markets.

They don’t know which metrics suffer skew from the Wall Street ETFs. They don’t realize that some data doesn’t adjust for Bitcoin’s gradually tighter range of prices.

We know the truth: your expectations can't be so precise. You have to take the market as it comes.

Many people can’t do that. They don't want to wait for great buying opportunities. They don't have the courage to invest in an asset when its price is beaten to shreds.

You do.

How do you use that patience, courage, and insight?

That's your challenge.

I'm happy to consult. Feel free to schedule a time with me on Tealfeed. Normally, I charge $200 for every half hour. Use this big discount to get that time for only $70.

(When you sign up, you don’t need to provide a WhatsApp number.)

Money first, revolutions later

Today, your cryptos are up. Some of you have multi-million dollar portfolios.

You feel compelled to protect those returns. It could take years for crypto to achieve its full potential, but you need money now.

As you can see from the danger chart I share in my market updates, prices have much more room to go down than up.

This makes for hard decisions.

Altseasons only come when the market’s overextended and momentum can carry prices far higher for far longer than seems possible.

But those are the same conditions that lead to big crashes suddenly, without warning, that take months or years to recover from.

If you're on the premium plan, you always know what's happening—often, not what you see on YouTube or social media. You’re focused on one of two outcomes:

1. The market drops hard enough to offer a good buying opportunity.

2. The market pumps hard enough to make you sell at a huge gain.

You're prepared whether the market peak comes now, at the end of 2025, or another time.

If you're not subscribed to my newsletter, it's not too late to sign up. Now is the perfect chance to do so.

Relax and enjoy the ride!