Veteran trader Peter Brandt called October 4 as the day Bitcoin’s bear market would end, but now he thinks the market beat him to it.
“There’s a good possibility we have seen the low and now are entering a new bull market cycle in Bitcoin,” Brandt tells Cointelegraph on the latest episode of Trade Secrets.
In July, Brandt warned that prices could fall into the high-$40,000 range. Bitcoin was trading near $64,000 when that interview was published and climbed to almost $85,000 by his latest appearance.
With the benefit of hindsight, Bitcoin’s fall to around $58,000 in late June may have already marked the cycle bottom.
But that doesn’t rule out a sharp drop first, says Brandt, who is on the lookout for a possible pullback toward $65,000 or $66,000 in early October.
“One thing that could happen, of course, is we just had too many people now chase the market,” he says. “They have bought the idea that the Bitcoin low is in and they have loaded up on the rally.”
A pullback could shake out those late buyers and give investors an opportunity to build their positions.
“We all know Bitcoin doesn’t go straight up.”
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Brandt sees Bitcoin hitting $500,000 this cycle
Brandt has also raised his sights for Bitcoin’s next peak, putting a late-2029 high of between $300,000 and $600,000, up from the $250,000 to $300,000 range he outlined in July.
“The bull market cycle this time has a very good chance of reaching half a million,” he says.
A million-dollar Bitcoin by 2030 isn’t impossible in his view, but he doesn’t need that target to come true for the trade to work. Brandt says he hasn’t invested all the money he has earmarked for Bitcoin. He would be content with 70% of that allocation in the market for 70% of the move into the projected 2029 highs.
“If Bitcoin’s $350,000 in late 2029, I’m not gonna be a million-dollar bull,” he says.
Price move ‘explanations’ are often wrong
Brandt is also wary of using headlines about the CLARITY Act or other events to explain every price move. He looks at the timing and pace of previous market cycles to gauge what could come next.
“Markets do something, traders need to create a narrative. More often than not, the narrative is at least partially wrong,” he says. “Let price be king.”
His model places the halving roughly halfway in time between the bear market low and the next peak. He expects gains to accelerate toward the end, with the final three or four months potentially delivering about 30% of the total increase.
Brandt’s forecast assumes a new bull market is already underway and that Bitcoin’s historical cycle patterns broadly hold. For now, finding the next buying opportunity with manageable risk matters more to him than whether Bitcoin reaches $100,000 by year-end.
“It’s unimportant,” he says. “I think more important is can we identify the next tradable spot where one can have somewhat of a measured risk?”
Brandt questions XRP’s investment appeal
Brandt is famously dismissive of many altcoins and he says the thesis of investors tipping money into “some fool coin” like XRP is often wrong.
XRP’s usefulness for payments and Ripple’s banking partnerships don’t automatically make it a winning investment in his eyes.
“Just because something is transactional, that doesn’t mean automatically that it must be more valuable,” he says, comparing it to the US dollar.
It works for payments, but people don’t buy it simply because they expect its transactional usefulness to push up its value.
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Ether and Solana get a warmer reception, with room for both alongside Bitcoin in his suggested crypto portfolio allocations. Chasing the next new token is another matter.
“Don’t be sold on the new upstarts, don’t be conned into the latest fast horse in the game,” he says.
For financially secure investors, he suggests a crypto allocation of up to 10%, with Bitcoin taking the largest share.
“I believe that trading is a marathon, not a sprint.”
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