Popular Analyst Predicted Bitcoin’s Latest Slide and Sees More Pain Ahead

Behind the Victory Lap

Market analyst Benjamin Cowen told his followers on Nov. 9 that a correction in equities was always his reason for expecting bitcoin to fall in the fourth quarter. He wrote:

This is what happened in Q4 of 2014, 2018, and 2022 as well. People can mock these ideas (and they have), but it does not stop the events from happening all the same.

Minutes later, he posted a video showing a chart zone traders usually draw from bitcoin’s 20-week and 21-week moving averages.

The timing gave him plenty to point at as bitcoin fell to about $73,900 late Sunday, its lowest level since August, before climbing back above $75,000. It is currently trading at $75,400. U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), meanwhile, have shed about $1.28 billion last week.

What Stocks Have Done So Far

Cowen’s thesis runs through equities, stating that the Nasdaq had dropped by nearly 15%, mirroring 2018, while the Russell index had lost 11% to 12% and the Dow about 7%. The S&P 500 had slipped only about 4% at that point.

The pressure has not eased since, with the Nasdaq falling nearly 5% last week, extending a four-week losing streak, and that stretch included a 5.5% single-day plunge on Nov. 5.

His own numbers also show the comparison is imperfect. Cowen said stocks fell 23% late in 2018, but he placed the start of 2022’s roughly 23% drop in the third quarter, which makes that year a looser fit for a strict fourth-quarter template. He has also said the call rests on three midterm cycles and is not an exact science.

Cowen has faced the crowded-trade objection before, and most recently he answered skeptics who argued that a widely expected correction could never arrive, noting that the same pushback preceded bitcoin’s lows in February and over the summer. He also pointed to Alphabet, which closed 12.6% lower on Oct. 29, as evidence that the move in stocks was real.

The Midterm Math Behind the Call

The framework comes from the four-year cycle, and midterm election years have historically been bitcoin’s weakest. Cowen’s July memo placed the next bottom in the fourth quarter of 2026, with seasonal math implying a floor near $44,000. He described that figure as an illustrative projection drawn from three observations, and it sits roughly 41% below the current price.

The same memo noted that two of the last three cycles bottomed inside the midterm year itself, in December 2018 and November 2022, while the 2014 cycle spilled into January 2015. Bitcoin.com News mapped those gaps before this month’s vote: Lows arrived 71, 39 and 13 days after the 2014, 2018 and 2022 elections. Applied to the Nov. 3 vote, that range runs from mid-November to mid-January.

Where the Call Could Still Break

Cowen expects a low within the next couple of months, followed by a bounce, and he thinks the S&P 500 will be among the last indexes to fall before any policy response. That leaves the broad index as the swing factor. It closed at 7,376.86 in the latest session, and Morgan Stanley strategist Mike Wilson has framed any dip toward 7,100 as a buying opportunity that could precede a run to 8,000.

Beyond that low, Cowen guesses that an OpenAI initial public offering in early 2027 could become the next major narrative.

Prediction markets are cautious, though they stop well short of Cowen’s most extreme math. Polymarket traders give bitcoin 46.5% odds of dipping to $70,000 this month, with 18.5% for $65,000 and 7.5% for $60,000. That contract only runs through November, while Cowen’s window stretches into early 2027.

The next checkpoints arrive quickly. U.S. inflation data lands on Tuesday, and Nvidia reports third-quarter earnings on Nov. 17. If equities keep sliding, Cowen will have more to say, but if they stabilize, the mockers he mentioned will get their turn.

The crypto market endured a volatile first week of November, briefly gaining approximately $100 billion following the U.S. midterm elections…