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Classify the regime, locate the cycle stage, and read whether strength is building or fading. The stage tells you which strategies have an edge right now.
You don't need a guru, you need a consistent rule. A robust one: price above a rising 200-day moving average and making higher highs is a bull regime — dips are usually for buying. Price below a falling 200-day and making lower lows is a bear — rallies are usually for selling.
A moving average is just the average price over the last N days, recomputed each day so it glides. The 200-day is beloved not because the number is magic but because it's long — long enough that daily noise cancels out and only the true tide remains. But the level alone can fool you: price can poke above a 200-day that is still pointing down, and that's a weak, suspect rally. The robust rule combines two things — price above the line and the line itself rising. Direction of the average is the market's underlying current; price crossing it is just a boat bobbing on the surface.
Because a written rule is mechanical, it removes the daily argument with yourself — the single biggest source of trading mistakes. This is the spirit of Gede: decide the rule in calm, then obey it when you're scared or greedy, precisely when your gut is least trustworthy.
Knowing which stage you're standing in tells you whether to be greedy, patient, or defensive.
The six stages aren't mystical — they're the fingerprint of smart money and crowd money trading places. In accumulation, patient buyers quietly absorb the shares of exhausted sellers while everyone else is bored or bitter. In markup, the trend gets obvious and the crowd finally believes. By euphoria, the last, most reluctant buyer has been dragged in — which is the problem, because with no one left to buy, the fuel is gone. Then in distribution the early smart money hands its bags to that euphoric crowd, and markdown plus capitulation is simply the crowd discovering it overpaid.
Crypto runs this loop faster and more violently than stocks because it trades 24/7, uses heavy leverage, and is driven by narrative and social contagion. That's why cycle-awareness is a survival skill here, not a nicety — Gede's discipline and Libo's early-narrative radar are both really just tools for standing in the right stage.
Sometimes, off a deep low, participation explodes all at once — a huge majority of assets surging together in a few days. That's a breadth thrust, historically one of the most reliable signs a new bull phase is starting. It feels wrong, because it happens while the news is still terrible — but broad, violent participation off a low is the market voting with both feet.
What makes a breadth thrust trustworthy is that it's impossible to manufacture with a handful of names. A single whale can rip one coin higher; nobody can make eighty percent of the whole market surge together for days without a genuine, broad shift in demand. The classic measures — like a 10-day advance ratio lurching from deeply oversold to an extreme high — capture exactly that: participation going from "almost everything falling" to "almost everything rising" in a compressed burst. It's the market's entire crowd changing its mind at once, and crowds that big move regimes.
The reason it feels wrong is timing: thrusts fire while the news is still grim and everyone is still scared, right off a brutal low. That emotional discomfort is the price of being early. The signal says the tide has turned before your feelings agree — which is exactly when the best entries live.
The danger sign is a thrust in reverse: price grinds to new highs while strength fades underneath. In 2021, the index made fresh highs even as fewer coins participated and momentum weakened beneath the surface. Watch only price and you saw a bull market; watch strength and you saw it ending.
The 2021 top is the textbook case of exhaustion: the headline index kept grinding to fresh highs, but underneath, fewer and fewer coins were still trending up, momentum was weakening, and each new high was made on thinner participation. Watch only price and you saw a raging bull; measure strength and you saw a market running on the last few leaders while the rank-and-file had already rolled over. When those last leaders finally faltered, there was nothing beneath them to catch the fall — hence the speed of the drop.
The practical lesson isn't "sell the instant you see it" — divergences can stretch for weeks. It's that a top is a process, not a moment: strength leaves the room gradually, then price leaves all at once. Seeing strength fade early is what lets you tighten stops and ladder out before the crowd, instead of being trapped in the stampede — the exact posture Brigitte and Lasirèn help you execute.
This is the practical payoff. In accumulation and early markup, accumulating and holding has the edge. In euphoria, you tighten stops and start laddering out. In distribution and markdown, you raise cash and respect the downtrend instead of buying every dip. Classify the regime first, then choose your move.
The subtle truth is that regime shouldn't just pick your tactic — it should set your position size. Two traders can hold the same view, but the one who sizes down in a hostile regime and up in a friendly one will win over time even with identical entries. In an early bull, you can afford wider stops and larger positions because the tide is helping you; in a bear, you shrink size, tighten stops, and demand cleaner setups because every trade is swimming upstream. Same skill, different volume knob — and the knob is turned by the regime.
There's one more layer: regimes transition, and the edges are where fortunes are made and lost. The move from euphoria to distribution, or capitulation to accumulation, is when the crowd is most wrong-footed. That's why the whole toolkit connects — breadth, cycle stage, thrusts, and exhaustion aren't separate lessons; together they let Gede answer one question: which weather am I in, and is it about to change?
1. Before choosing a strategy you should first:
2. The six stages run, in order:
3. A breadth thrust off a bottom signals: