The Bottom Pump Is Over. Welcome to the Chase.

Rose from the ashes, now flying towards the moon!

Look at the monthly candles. This week’s push above $83,000 is the same shape, in the same position, as March 2023, the second strong green monthly candle after the initial explosive bounce off a generational low, not the bounce itself. Back then, that second candle was the confirmation that the bottom pump had done its job and the market had moved into its next phase. The same pattern just printed again, with the same conviction, in the same spot on the chart, three and a half years later.

That distinction matters more than it might look like on the surface. The first candle off a bottom is the reflexive bounce, the relief rally, the move that gets dismissed as a bear market trap by almost everyone watching it. The second candle, the one that holds and extends with real strength rather than fading back into the range, is the one that tells you the bottom itself is behind you and price has entered a genuinely new phase. That’s exactly where this week’s move sits.

Source: https://www.tradingview.com/x/wsaUI7rN/

The Bottom Pump Is Over. This Is the Chase Leg Now.

With price actively pushing above the entire bottoming and generational low zone for this cycle, the phase that follows has a name worth understanding: the chase leg. This is the stretch where retail participants who missed the actual bottom, the $57,000 to $60,000 zone that held for months, are forced to buy back in at meaningfully higher prices than where the opportunity actually was. Nobody chasing here is getting the deal the market offered a few months ago. They’re getting the next best thing, which is still meaningfully better than what most of them will be paying a few months from now if this pattern holds.

Some of the loudest voices from a few weeks ago are already walking it back. Several of the more notorious “I’ll wait and buy in October” callers were quietly admitting defeat on social media overnight as price pushed straight through the major $83,000 resistance level with real strength behind it. The crowded, popular, mainstream call didn’t get its entry. That’s not a coincidence, it’s the market doing what it usually does to the most widely agreed-upon prediction.

The Honest Numbers

From the absolute low in July to this week’s move, Bitcoin is up more than 51% in under 90 days. That’s a genuinely exceptional run, and it’s worth being precise about who actually captured it. That return belonged to the people who deployed meaningful additional capital at the bottom with real conviction, while the crowd was still calling for lower lows and a further leg down. It did not belong to everyone equally, and it’s worth being honest about that rather than pretending the whole market participated evenly.

For everyone who didn’t buy the exact bottom, the honest message is twofold. No, this doesn’t mean the opportunity is gone. But it’s worth being clear-eyed about the shape of returns from here compared to previous cycles. As Bitcoin matures as an asset class, volatility has been smoothing out on both sides, the downside corrections and the upside explosions alike. Diminishing returns cycle over cycle is a real, observable pattern in this asset’s history, not a reason for pessimism, but a reason to recalibrate expectations rather than assume this move repeats the multiples of cycles past.

What’s Actually Left on the Table

Roughly a third of this cycle’s expected gains have already come and gone in the first month off the breakout alone. That leaves the other two thirds still ahead, but not on a timeline measured in weeks. Based on the expansion-phase pattern already covered in this note series, roughly three years, pointing toward 2029 as the window where the bulk of what’s left plays out. The first move is fast and violent by design. What follows it is slower, longer, and requires the same thing it always has: patience.

The Constructive Half of the Trade

The bottom pump did its job, and the chart just confirmed it the same way it did in March 2023. What comes next isn’t the easy part, it’s the chase leg, where the crowd that waited too long pays up for what the patient capital already secured months ago. Nobody who missed the exact low has missed the whole opportunity, but the easiest, cheapest entry of this cycle has already happened. What’s left is the long, patient stretch that historically produces the other two thirds of the move, not another 51% in another ninety days.

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Stormrake Spotlight: Pax Gold (PAXG) ($4,361)

Source: https://www.tradingview.com/x/U4YgqSVU/

PAXG has held steady, and remains above the $4,333 local trend support. If we can see a push above the Moving Average 50 (orange line) on the daily timeframe, then momentum may favour the bulls, however in a heavy risk-on environment, such as the period we’re entering now, it’s more common to see Bitcoin outperform a steady asset such as Gold during these periods, especially when Bitcoin has just confirmed a generational cycle’s low and keeps gaining momentum in the early months of a bull run, such as now.

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BTC/USD Key Levels and Price Action:

Source: https://www.tradingview.com/x/AArx0Hzu/

Today’s chart we’re zooming out over the last 6 months to show you just how obviously bullish this bottoming setup was, and how like we’ve discussed, hindsight would be twenty-twenty for those that didn’t allocate further once we broke. Bitcoin made an inverse head & shoulders within a larger inverse head & shoulders - both incredibly bullish feeding into each other to get us above $86K today. The smaller setup between June & August was the first of the pattern, which then broke-out to the upside and created a smaller right shoulder for the bigger-larger more bullish version of the same pattern. $83K was the larger setup’s resistance, and this week we slammed right through it, without any hesitation what-so-ever. The bottom pump looks complete. What comes next is likely to be the chase after this cycle's generational bottoming rally, the kind people look back on in hindsight and wish they'd caught. Some may still miss it again, waiting for lower entries that don't come. This is the stark reality of this asset-class; it waits for no-one, and the only wrong thing to do here is to not take action. Prepare yourself with maximum conviction for the next few years ahead - before it really is too late.

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*All prices are denominated in USD unless stated otherwise*

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Written by James Ryan