This Would Be Max Pain
Investors,
It’s no secret that Bitcoin is in a bear market.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are still unwilling to accept this fact.
They’ve been unwilling to embrace nuance, opting to believe that the “strong” stock market environment was going to put a bid under Bitcoin and resume the bull market.
They decided to use faulty M2 charts to forecast a huge rally for Bitcoin.
They suggested that gold’s exponential run would cause Bitcoin to resume higher.
They created new signals to justify that BTC had bottomed & would make new ATHs.
But none of those ideas have worked.
Why?
Why did these fail?
Because Bitcoin is in a bear market.
And bear markets are just downtrends.
There’s no need to be scared or panicked.
It’s just a downtrend.
They only hurt you if you fight them.
By very definition, downtrends produce lower highs and lower lows.
So these investors saw key support levels and believed that they’d work again failed to recognize one simple fact: support levels fail during downtrends because price will produce a lower low.
So what’s the point of using a prior low to extrapolate support?
But let’s think about this a bit deeper…
If bear markets are just downtrends, and downtrends are just the production of lower lows and lower highs, then we must recognize that bear markets have rallies.
Often times, the bulls who relentlessly posted “the lows are in” get reinvigorated during these rallies, believing that the market is proving their thesis correct.
They get louder.
They shout “I TOLD YOU SO”.
They post screenshots of their gains.
Only for the market, more likely than not, to produce a lower high and then resume in the direction of the downtrend via the production of new lower lows.
Therefore, max pain in a bear market is experienced by bulls who fight the trend.
Max pain is experienced by impatient investors who operate on FOMO when an asset undergoes a relief rally in the context of a broader downtrend.
Logically, I want to avoid max pain.
Instead, I’d prefer to align with trends and adapt if trends change.
Ideally, I want to use these objective downtrend conditions to my advantage.
That’s why I wrote the Bear Market Playbook in November 2025 after I publicly flipped bearish on Bitcoin after my bear market signal flashed at $97,000.
That’s why I’ve written follow-up reports to explain more details and follow up on some of the signals that I foreshadowed.
I’m using this bear market to my advantage, embracing a survival mentality to ensure that I make it to the other side, when a new uptrend inevitably reforms.
So what does a “max pain” type of scenario actually look like?
This is what I think is probable: