Ben Cowen Says You Have Permission to be Bullish

Ben Cowen (0:00)

I gotta be honest, I'm very confused. This is the thing though, David, you've probably gone through this before, where the market just doesn't make sense sometimes.

It's like, why is, last cycle, why was Ethereum trading so low, when Bitcoin was so high, right? Why? There's so many different times in markets where it doesn't make sense, but markets don't have to make sense. You know, I mean, maybe crypto is pricing all this stuff in before it happened.

David Hoffman (0:33)

Bankless Nation, it is an interesting time in the market. There appears to be an inflection point with the sentiment, the bullishness around the market. And so we're bringing back on Ben Cowen from the Cryptoverse. Ben, welcome back to Bankless.

Ben Cowen (0:45)

Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here as always.

David Hoffman (0:47)

Ben, you recently had to put out a video boldly stating, I was wrong. You were calling for a queue for Flush. I think that was pretty consensus for a while.

A queue for Flush around the time of the midterms, which matched previous cycles. As I understand it, you were basically calling for a repeat of the standard four-year cycle, which that's where the queue for bottoming happened. You're also pointing to the midterms. Rather than seemingly a queue to bottom, which is what we are so far experiencing, what gives you the conviction now that you were wrong then? Like why, what made you actually wave the flag and say like, okay, I was actually wrong?

Ben Cowen (1:25)

Well, I mean, the post about me being wrong was not about sort of whatever happens in queue four, because who knows what happens in queue four, right? Like we don't know yet.

It was more so like I didn't think we would take out the May high, right? Because in all prior bear markets, once we've crossed the 50-week moving average, once we put in a higher high, the bear market was always over. And so like I didn't really give the idea of taking out the May high, a lot of weight. And so the 57k that Bitcoin hit on July 1st, I thought that was a local low because in 2018, we kind of bottomed at 5,700 right around the same time. It seemed like that would be the summer low. And then I expected a rally in July. And that was kind of where I first felt like I was kind of like getting off because we didn't really have a rally in July. We kind of just stayed at 60k. And then so by the time August came around, I was more so in the camp that we would go ahead and start kind of trending down into a low. But instead we started, we got the rally. I thought we would get in July. We got it in August, right? And so that was kind of how I first got on the wrong side, I think of that. From here, I mean, you know, I don't really know what's going to happen in Q4. A lot of it, I guess, depends on if we get this, you know, if Bitcoin can continue to accept above the range highs.

If it does not, like if we fade back down, we could still see Q4 weakness, but I don't, like I wouldn't necessarily be in the camp that it has to be like a lower low, right? Like it could be a higher low for all we know, especially given the fact that we've printed a higher high. So I think that that's kind of where I am right now. And the reason I admitted I was wrong was just because I think it's important to do that when you are wrong. You know, if I spend two months saying, I don't think we're going to take out the May high, and then we take it out, right? I mean, like, where am I to hide? So yeah, I think that was important, and we'll see what Q4 has in store.

David Hoffman (3:31)

Just to emphasize what you're saying, really, it was about the middle of the year, the timeframe around now about being bullish. You go on to Crypto Twitter, everyone's very, very bullish and excited. There's a lot of momentum. There's a lot of happiness in the market. And that's the part where you weren't expecting, where, sure, even in bear markets, we can go up 30%, but we kind of did it twice. Bitcoin kind of did it twice from 63K up to 77K and then up to 85K again. That second move feels a little soon in the bear market. And if you are in the opinion that actually the low is behind us and we're resuming the next phase of the cycle, and then you look at the length of that bear market that we've had so far, it's short and it's easy and it's not that painful. And that's like the unique odd thing that I think people like you and even people like everyone, I think are really contending with right now.