Pi Cycle Top

Three lines share one price axis. The faint grey line is bitcoin's closing price, the white line its 111-day simple moving average, and the red line twice its 350-day simple moving average. The chips switch the axis between logarithmic and linear and cut the chart to the last one, two, four or eight years.

The indicator is the crossing. Most of the time the 111-day average runs well below the doubled 350-day one. When the price rises fast enough for long enough, the shorter average catches up, and the day it closes at or above the red line is a cross. The line under the chart's title says whether the two are crossed today, and the readout above the plot gives both averages now.

Dashed verticals mark the halvings. Hovering any day shows the close and both averages that day, and each line can be switched off in the legend.

Philip Swift, who made the indicator, found that the 111-day average crossing above twice the 350-day one had marked the tops of 2013 and 2017 within days. 350 divided by 111 is about 3.153, close to pi, which gave the indicator its name. The windows were chosen by looking at those tops, so the indicator fits them by construction; the real test is what it did after it was published.

On 12 April 2021 the averages crossed, a day before the highest close of the spring rally. The cycle's highest close came later, on 8 November 2021, and at that top the 111-day average stood far below the red line: there was no second cross. The table sets every cross beside every top so both cases read off one list.

Perly computes both averages from its own daily closes, each dated to the day it was made, so a cross here can fall a day away from where a chart built on other data puts it.

Two moving averages cannot see ahead; they describe the speed of a rise that is already behind them. A cross has come only in fast, steep rallies, and a top reached slowly may never produce one, as November 2021's did not. The indicator marks tops only and says nothing about lows.