James Check: Spot Buyers Saving Bitcoin Amid Time Pain | SLP755

**James Check** (0:00)
Markets are not about buying the perfect bottom. No one's gonna send you a medallion or a medal for buying the perfect bottom. The right way to do it is just to be like, are we in a discounted territory? Like, we're in the bottom 10%, 15% of all the distribution. We're in the bottom 10, 15%. That means you got an 85 to 90% chance of being right. Just DC that. Stop overthinking it. Just buy that probability distribution, because the 85 to 90% is ahead of you.
Doesn't feel like it right now, but people fix that and try to buy the bottom 1%, and it's just not a real thing. You will lose your mind trying to do it.

**Stephan Livera** (0:32)
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Rejoining me on the show today is my friend James Check, aka Checkmatey from the website Check on Chain, which is a great newsletter. I'm a subscriber of myself.
And yeah, interested to get into your thoughts, James, on where things are at. So yeah, welcome back to the show. And look, we're in this bear market. I know you have your framework where you talk about price pain and time pain. So let's just start there. Where do you think we are?

**James Check** (1:00)
Yeah, I mean, good to see you again, mate. It's been a long time.
Yeah, so my framework, at the end of the day, market cycles, the way I try to analyze things, it's all about human psychology. And a lot of the metrics we look at in the on-chain world, I think people fall down the wrong, and I get it, it's very natural. They're looking for predictions. They're looking for something or some metric to tell them the future with perfect accuracy.

**Stephan Livera** (1:22)
Tell me the exact level, James.

**James Check** (1:23)
Oh, totally. Tell me the exact price we're going to bottom out. When's it going to happen? It's like, guys, this is not how it works. So the way I look at things is by human psychology. And bear markets, they go from euphoria to utter despair. There's a journey, obviously, between here and there. But I've said this before, that the last day of a bear market is the worst day, and it's actually the first day of the bull. Doesn't feel like it at the time, but we're trying to understand that spectrum. So 2025 was an interesting year. We didn't have the below-the-top most people expected. We didn't get to the price most people expected. It's kind of this slow grind. And I think the other thing that people may not have understood at the time as much, Bitcoin entered a bear market versus gold and silver and AI stocks from about January 2025 It was the best-performing asset in the world above everything else. And just to give people a sense of scale here, going from the 2023 bottom, and why I think that's a very fair, so the first January 2023, that's a very fair starting point because it was at the arse end of the 2022 bear market. Everything got hit, right? Everything. Bonds, golds, stocks, the whole lot. So everything's coming off, the fastest rate hiking cycle, blah, blah, blah.
Silver's parabola, which had Bitcoiners losing their mind, absolutely losing their mind in the timeline. Silver's vertical parabola, literally including Bitcoin's drawdown at the time, when it peaked in January 2026, matched Bitcoin's performance to that point. So that just gives you a bit of a sense of scale that Bitcoin did really, really well up to January 25 But then everything else started to run. So we kind of entered this bear market or this parabola euphoria, I like to call it, where we were watching all this other stuff going up and like, yeah, Bitcoin got to a new high, but, you know, from 110 to 125 And it just wasn't enough for people.
Then we had what I call the price pain capitulation. So in November, we sold off from 126 to 80 That is when I think most people realized, oh, hang on a second, that's not a dip, that feels different. And then when we got to 60K in February, that was what I call the price pain capitulation. Everyone who owned Bitcoin at that point in time, who was like a fleeting buyer, a fair weather, I'm here for the good times, suddenly they get hit with the bad times, they go, no, I'm out, I'm done, can't do it. Like 50% down, get me out of this thing.
Now there's still a ton of people who are like, you know, they're not as experienced or they keep thinking, don't worry, it's gonna come back. And then you go through what I call the time pain phase. After the price pain capitulation, and my equivalent level to this in 2022 was June. June, I think, was our February. That's when Three Arrows blew up, Lunar's gone, but FTX hasn't blown up yet. We hit like 17,600, and then we chopped sideways for like six, seven months and just did nothing between like 25 and 20