Bitcoin (BTC, BUY) - Bitcoin’s Bull Market Has Begun; Establishing a $250,000 Cycle Target by 2029

Bitcoin (BTC, BUY) - Bitcoin’s Bull Market Has Begun; Establishing a $250,000 Cycle Target by 2029

We believe Bitcoin has entered a new bull-market regime. We maintain BUY and establish a $250,000 cycle target to be reached by 2029 or earlier, implying approximately 190% upside from the latest price near $86,100. Higher lows, higher highs and recovery above key investor cost bases support moving beyond our July late-bear-market assessment. Renewed ETF buying adds evidence that demand is recovering alongside price. Expected policy headwinds failed to break the uptrend. The CLARITY Act setback and the Fed’s 25bp hike were largely anticipated. BTC’s policy-week drawdown was 5.9%, while its lowest price in the 24 hours following the FOMC decision was just 1.0% below the pre-decision reference. The subsequent recovery cleared the May high of $82,814, taking gains from the July trough to 49.1%. This progression—from a contained pullback to recovery and a fresh breakout—strengthens our conviction in the cycle turn. The September cost-basis recovery is now accompanied by renewed ETF demand. BTC briefly slipped below the True Market Mean near $76,000–77,000 but remained above the short-term-holder cost basis before recovering above both benchmarks. ETFs attracted $4.20bn of net inflows from August 17 through September 21, reversing the direction of the $8.42bn withdrawn during eight consecutive outflow weeks in May–early July. September 21’s $937.3mn inflow was the largest since the October 2025 cycle peak. These flows provide a demand-side cross-check to the improving price structure. A limited hiking cycle leaves our longer-term fiscal thesis intact. Persistent primary deficits and higher refinancing costs strengthen incentives to contain government financing costs over time. Financial repression remains a plausible source of support for Bitcoin’s monetary premium, even while tighter liquidity presents near-term headwinds. The more material cyclical risk is a sustained upward repricing of the tightening endpoint or the duration of restrictive policy. Our $250,000 target combines a gold-relative valuation anchor with an on-chain cost-basis cross-check. On a 21mn terminal-supply basis, the target implies a $5.25tn network value, equivalent to 16.9% of gold’s estimated market value at our September 22 reference price and near the lower end of our initiation’s 15%–25% range. Under our financial-repression scenario, gold could appreciate alongside Bitcoin, expanding the dollar value of the store-of-value benchmark itself. Illustratively, a 20%–30% increase in gold would reduce the target’s implied BTC-to-gold value ratio to 13.0%–14.1%, holding the physical gold stock unchanged. Further gold appreciation would therefore provide additional support for the target without requiring as large an increase in Bitcoin’s relative allocation. The required TMM growth is below all three historical recovery windows in our analysis. A 50%–70% premium to True Market Mean requires that cost basis to reach approximately $147,000–167,000, implying 24%–29% annualized growth over three years from the current $76,890. This compares with approximately 39% over the three years following the April 2023 recovery signal, with even faster growth in the recoveries beginning in December 2015 and May 2019.