Crypto Super Hub — The CSH Weekly Brief | August 16, 2026
Tomorrow, Bitcoin ties a record almost nobody is watching.
The CSH Score has now spent 74 straight days in the 20 to 30 band, the zone we call accumulation territory. One more day ties the longest run in the score’s 14-year history. Two more breaks it. No crash, no breakout, no headlines. Price has been stuck between roughly $59,000 and $66,500 for two and a half months, the longest stretch of nothing this market has ever produced.
Most people treat a market like this as a reason to switch off. I did the opposite. I spent the week with a trading book written in 1923, about a trader born in 1877, and it turns out to explain this exact stretch, and about half the people in your feed, better than anything published this year.
It also handed me the only sentence you need for the next few months. More below.
Everything in this issue runs on the free version of the app:
CSH Score: 24.7/100 — Early Cycle (−0.7 on the week). Bottom 21% of every reading since 2011, and day 74 of the unbroken run between 20 and 30.
Key indicators:
BTC: US$63,066 / A$89,098 (7d: −2.76%)
BTC Dominance: 58.91%
ETH/BTC: 0.0298
TOTAL3/BTC (alts priced in Bitcoin): 0.37, flat on the week
200-week moving average: ~US$63,900. Price is now about 1.4% below it
Bull market support band: ~US$68,800 to US$69,100 overhead
Callback: Last issue I showed you what a perfect bottom call was worth: 24% over a plain banded plan, and every realistic alternative 49 to 71 per cent behind it. This week the market tested the other half of that argument. Nothing happened. For 74 days, mostly nothing has happened. That’s the part no backtest can teach you, because the hard bit of a plan isn’t the maths. It’s the sitting.
Jake’s read: the squeeze I described last week is resolving, and not upward. Price is sitting about 1.4% under the 200-week moving average, and if it stays here we get a weekly close below it right as we enter August and September, historically Bitcoin’s two weakest months. Meanwhile the S&P 500 closed at another record this week and gold is near all-time highs. Stocks at records with Bitcoin 49.5% off its high is not a combination I’d lean bullish into. Our base case is unchanged: weakness into September or October, roughly 80% of the way through this bear on time, and watching for the first CSH Score reading under 20, which still hasn’t printed. My scheduled buys keep running either way. Not advice, just what my plan is doing.
The best thing I read this year was written 103 years ago.
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is a lightly fictionalised account of Jesse Livermore, who started trading in Boston bucket shops at fifteen and made his first million shorting the panic of 1907, a million of it in a single day. He also went broke more than once getting there. The man failed more times than most people ever try.
One passage has stuck with me all week. An old trader the customers called Old Turkey gets pestered for tips, and every time someone tells him to take profits before a dip, he gives the same answer: he can’t, because he’d lose his position, and the big money was never in the wiggles. It was in the main move. Sizing up the whole market and its trend, then not letting go.
Livermore’s own words on it:
“It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! ... Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon.”
And the line I’d frame on the wall of every crypto account on X:
“The market does not beat them. They beat themselves, because though they have brains they cannot sit tight.”
Be right, sit tight. Two separate jobs.
Being right is the work you do on a calm day. Read the conditions, form a view only you can own, write the plan down. That’s what the CSH Score and the Plan Builder are for: the score tells you where Bitcoin sits in its cycle, the plan decides in advance what you’ll do about it. Right now the score reads 24.7, the bottom 21% of every reading since 2011. My view, which I’ve held for months: cheap, probably not the low, accumulation territory on a plan.
Sitting tight is the harder job, and it points in different directions depending on the market. In a bull market it means letting the position run past every urge to take a tidy profit. Livermore again: “you never grow poor taking profits. No, you don’t. But neither do you grow rich taking a four-point profit in a bull market.” In a bear it means the opposite: patience while the conditions grind through the boring part. This bear has been the boring part for 74 straight days.
Here’s what the score’s own history says about runs like this one. The four longest stretches in the 20 to 30 band before now: 75 days ending December 2016, 66 ending October 2023, 62 ending January 2016, 57 ending August 2022. Three of those four resolved upward into accumulation that paid. The 2022 one broke down into the November low.
But the detail that matters is one layer deeper. Of those four, only the 2022 run happened in the middle of a bear market, before the low was in. The 2016 and 2023 runs all came after their bears had already bottomed, when quiet really was accumulation. The one streak that looked most like today’s, mid-bear with hope still in the market, is the one that broke down.
That’s not a prediction. It’s a reason to respect both outcomes, and it’s why the plan covers both: scheduled buys the whole way through, bigger tiers locked and waiting for a sub-20 reading that might never come, and exactly what they’re there for if the record streak resolves the 2022 way.
One more thing from the book that made me laugh out loud. Livermore describes the “semisucker” as the bloke who “knows all the don’ts that ever fell from the oracular lips of the old stagers, excepting the principal one, which is: Don’t be a sucker!” He’s also the type who “thinks he has cut his wisdom teeth because he loves to buy on declines.” Written in 1923. He’d have a field day with crypto Twitter.
There is nothing new in markets. There can’t be, because speculation is as old as the hills, and human nature hasn’t changed since.
I automated myself out of a job this month. The boring half of it, anyway.
Every Sunday for the past year I’ve sat down and manually pulled the week’s numbers: X analytics, LinkedIn, the newsletter stats, all of it into one review. Thirty-plus minutes, every week, and me doing it added exactly nothing. So I set up Claude to do the whole pull automatically on Sunday mornings and log the report before I’m out of bed. It even drives the browser itself for the parts that don’t have an export. Slowly, mind you. But it doesn’t make mistakes, and it doesn’t need me watching.
The reason I’m telling you this isn’t the tool. It’s the principle, and it’s the same principle as the score. Automate the repeatable decisions so your energy goes to the ones that actually need you. That’s all the CSH system is: the data pull is automated, the plan executes by rules you set in advance, and the only job left for you is the one that matters, deciding what kind of investor you want to be on a calm day.
Tom’s SMSF plan goes public on X this week too. Short version: he’s set it deliberately aggressive, deploying only between a CSH Score of 10 and 20, scaling up as it falls. That zone hasn’t printed once this bear, so his plan has sat in cash all year, exactly as written. Sitting tight isn’t only a holding skill. The Plan Builder he used is free.
The scams are getting worse, not better, and they’re coming for super. Two weeks after I wrote about SMSF savings lost to a fake yield platform, I watched more of it cross the desk this week, including six-figure USDT purchases headed for external wallets with all the classic red flags attached. We caught one before the money left. The industry only ever sees the ones that get caught. So what: the number one rule in crypto hasn’t changed and never will. Never send funds to a wallet you don’t control, and treat every promised return as the opening line of a theft. For scale: boring spot Bitcoin, bought on any of the 325 cheap days in 2022 and 2023 and just held, returned between 4.2x and 7.9x at the 2025 top. Nobody offering you “guaranteed 20%” can compete with that, and they were never planning to pay you anyway.
The S&P 500 set another record while Bitcoin sat 49.5% below its own. US stocks made fresh all-time highs this week on cooling inflation data, gold is near records at about US$4,376, and Bitcoin went sideways again. So what: that divergence won’t hold forever, and I don’t know which side closes the gap. My plan doesn’t need to know. It’s also worth saying plainly: risk assets at records while rate expectations wobble is late-innings behaviour, which is one more reason we’re not in a hurry.
Watch tomorrow morning’s weekly close. Price is sitting about 1.4% below the 200-week moving average, roughly US$63,900. Bitcoin has closed a week below that line exactly once this cycle, at the end of June, and it snapped straight back. A second close below it, heading into the historically weak August-September window, would confirm the market is still working through the down leg. So what: no action from me either way. The levels are context. The score is the input, and it reads 24.7.
Tuesday: the record. If the CSH Score holds between 20 and 30 through Tuesday, this becomes the longest stretch in that band in the score’s history, past the 75-day run from late 2016. I’ll post what that has meant historically, both the times it resolved up and the time it didn’t.
Monday 10am AEST: the weekly candle closes. Above or below US$63,900. See Quick Hits.
Thursday: this week’s article. Be Right, Sit Tight: the full Livermore piece, what a 1923 book gets right about 2026, and how we’ve built the sitting into a system so you don’t have to be a once-a-century freak to manage it.
Quiet macro week. The next big scheduled prints are US CPI September 11 and the Fed decision September 16. Three Fed officials voted for a hike in July. September is where that argument gets settled.
Livermore made and lost four fortunes, and the thing he said mattered most wasn’t a trade. It was sitting still when he was right.
This market is a 74-day test of exactly that. Most people fail it quietly: they don’t sell the bottom, they just stop buying, stop looking, drift off to whatever’s moving. The plan is what sits tight for you.
Be right on a calm day. Then let the system do the sitting.
— Jake
Nothing in this email is financial advice. The CSH Score is a measurement, not a signal, and past cycles don’t guarantee anything about this one.
One word back: are you still buying this bear, yes or no?
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