Veteran Trader Says Bitcoin Bottom Is Already In

Bitcoin is trading near eighty-five thousand dollars on Sunday, which makes today one of the more awkward dates on the crypto calendar. Months ago, veteran trader Peter Brandt picked October 4 as the exact day the bitcoin bottom would arrive, with prices tumbling into the high forty-thousands before the market turned. The date arrived. The crash did not. Brandt has since walked back the timing, telling Cointelegraph in a recent interview that the cycle low probably happened back in the summer and that a new bull market may already be underway.

The original call came from a July interview with Cointelegraph, when Brandt was one of the few well-known traders willing to name a specific day for the bitcoin bottom. His reasoning leaned on Bitcoin's four-year rhythm. The April 2024 halving was followed by a record near one hundred twenty-six thousand dollars in October 2025, and Brandt argued that past cycles typically turned roughly a year after the peak. Because every major Bitcoin bear market has produced a drop of more than eighty percent from the top, he said prices could sink below fifty thousand dollars before buyers found their nerve again.

The timeline has shifted. In a newer appearance on Cointelegraph's Trade Secrets program, Brandt said the market may have bottomed in late June, when Bitcoin slid toward fifty-eight thousand dollars and then drifted sideways through July and August. That would put his call off by six or seven weeks. "I don't want to make my understanding of the market fit the market. I want the market to fit my understanding, and so I'm kind of back to the drawing board," he said, according to a report on the interview carried by TradingView.

Why the call changed

Brandt's revision rests on his long-held view of how a bitcoin bottom actually forms. In the July interview he argued that sentiment was merely neutral, and that durable lows arrive on panic and heavy selling rather than calm. The June slide, in his newer telling, may have been the shakeout he had been waiting for, simply arriving early. Other market researchers had also flagged October as a possible turning point, with price targets ranging from the high thirty-thousands to the mid fifty-thousands, according to CCN's reporting at the time.

He is not declaring victory on the call. Brandt told Cointelegraph he still wants to see a "tradable low" in early October, a dip toward the mid sixty-thousands that would flush out late buyers who piled in expecting a straight run higher. The idea, in his words, is that such a washout would clear the market and give larger holders room to add to positions before any sustained advance. For traders watching the bitcoin bottom debate about the bitcoin bottom, that leaves the door open to one more shakeout even inside a new bull cycle.

Where he sees bitcoin going next

Over a longer horizon, Brandt's outlook has turned more ambitious than his summer caution suggested. He now says the coming cycle peak could land between three hundred thousand and six hundred thousand dollars late in the decade, an upgrade from the quarter-million-dollar range he floated in July. He put the chances of the market eventually reaching five hundred thousand dollars as very high, while stressing that the forecast assumes past cycles repeat their rough shape. It is the kind of long-range target that makes the missed date look like a footnote, assuming the June low really was the bitcoin bottom.

Skeptics have reasons to stay cautious. Brandt's own history shows how precise date-calling can embarrass even a trader with five decades of experience, and Bitcoin's price remains well below last year's record. Still, the shift matters because Brandt is one of the few chart veterans whose calls move sentiment across crypto Twitter and trading desks alike. If he is right that the low is behind us, the conversation for the rest of the year changes from "how far does it fall" to "how far does the recovery run."