Ran Neuner argues that bitcoin’s real market cycle is driven by global liquidity and PMI, not the four-year halving myth that traders still cling to.
Summary
- YouTuber Ran Neuner says the four-year bitcoin halving cycle was a comforting but misleading myth built on just three data points.
- He shows that bitcoin’s past peaks and troughs have followed global liquidity, central bank balance sheets and PMI, not the halving calendar.
- With the tightening ending and liquidity set to increase, he warns that the retail industry will now hand over cheap coins to institutions.
Bitcoin’s familiar four-year rhythm has not been broken, Ran Neuner argues, it was never the real metronome of the market in the first place. In a lively 17-minute episode of Crypto Insider, the host dismantles the industry’s favorite calendar myth and replaces it with a colder key variable: global liquidity.
Halving as a reassuring illusion
Neuner opens with a warning that “if you’re about to sell your crypto because you think the recent cycle just ended, you’re about to become the institutions’ dumb money.” He admits that in the last three halving cycles, “Bitcoin has now roughly topped out” in the year following the halving, with known declines of 80 percent conditioning traders to expect a time-based bear market. The halving scheme, he says, gave analysts “three full cycles of data” and a reassuring narrative that “made the market predictable,” but “anyone who knows anything about statistics will tell you that three batches of data does not constitute a significant sample size.”
Rather than accept the pattern at face value, Neuner says he put macro, liquidity, equity and political data into “one chart, one model” and found that the halving “definitely played a role, but it was a small factor.” “The real rise in the price of Bitcoin (BTC) was not caused by the halving,” he points out, “but by something much, much bigger” that emerged in all three previous cycles and has not yet appeared in this one.
Liquidity as a real cycle driver
That bigger force is quantitative easing and the broader expansion of the global money supply. Reflecting on previous bull markets, Neuner reminds viewers that after the first halving in late 2012, Bitcoin’s move from $10 to $1,250 coincided with the Federal Reserve “injecting $85 billion of liquidity into the market every month,” ultimately adding more than $1 trillion to its balance sheet. When the Fed started to slow down and then ended quantitative easing, Bitcoin fell from around $1,000 to $150, a drop that “aligns perfectly with the halving cycle,” but which he says was actually caused by the withdrawal of liquidity.
He follows the same pattern in 2017, when Bitcoin rose from roughly $1,000 to $20,000 as the European Central Bank executed one of its largest bond-buying programs, the Bank of Japan “bought bonds and ETFs at an unprecedented pace” and China “unleashed the largest credit boom in history.” The Covid-era rally from $4,000 to $69,000 also followed what he calls “the largest global liquidity injection in the history of finance,” with the Fed expanding its balance sheet by more than $5 trillion, while other major central banks followed suit.
PMI, settings and the ‘real’ clock
To give the argument a measurable anchor, Neuner turns to the global Purchasing Managers’ Index, which he describes as “the most important measure that tracks” whether the economy is growing or shrinking. He notes that when the PMI bottoms and then rises above 50, “liquidity starts to return” and Bitcoin historically finds a bottom, while values above 55 have marked the start of the “real bull runs” and levels around 60 coincide with what he calls the “altcoin super cycle.” In both the 2017 and 2020 cycles, he says, the PMI exceeded these thresholds as central banks expanded their balance sheets and crypto markets went vertical.
“This time the Fed cycle and PMI did not correspond to a halving,” Neuner argues, noting that the Fed has sucked away liquidity through quantitative tightening over the past two years and that the PMI has fallen flat to slightly. That, he says, explains why “it should have been a bull market, but it wasn’t,” and why Bitcoin is now trading lower than where it started the year, despite the narrative tailwind of another halving. “The halving clock and the liquidity clock were correlated for three cycles, but this cycle they decoupled,” he says, leaving traders anchored to a calendar that no longer reflects underlying conditions.
A warning to retailers
Neuner’s conclusion is blunt: “We have never entered a bear market during a period of increasing liquidity. Never, not once in history.” With the Federal Reserve ending its tightening, looking at lower interest rates and an eventual return to quantitative easing, it expects the PMI to take off and institutional algorithms to definitely go into risk-on mode. “Do you think Larry Fink has a rainbow map on his wall?” he asks. “Do you think Larry Fink cares about the four-year cycle? He doesn’t. But I guarantee he’s watching liquidity. I guarantee he’s watching the Fed’s balance sheet… and the PMI.”
He views the current pullback as a trap, telling viewers that if they sell now for fear of a “four-year cycle ghost,” they will “literally sell your coins at the bottom” to institutional buyers, just before the liquidity cycle really begins. “The four-year cycle was a lie,” Neuner says in his closing remarks. “This cycle isn’t over yet. In fact, this cycle hasn’t even started yet.”
