Standard Chartered Says Bitcoin's Bear Market Low Is "Almost In" — Three Signals to Watch
Geoff Kendrick points to Strategy's buyback history, ETF holder behavior, and a thinning pool of leveraged longs as the conditions most likely to confirm a price floor.
Bitcoin's seven-day slide has been one of the more bruising stretches the crypto market has endured since the sharp February drawdown. The world's largest cryptocurrency has lost roughly 14% of its value in a single week, pulling it back into territory it hadn't visited since that earlier correction rattled investor confidence. Altcoins have followed without exception, and the mood across digital asset markets has curdled into something closer to outright defensiveness.
Most analysts are watching the $60,000 level with quiet dread. A sustained breach below that threshold, they argue, could open the door to significantly deeper losses and reignite a wider conversation about structural weakness in the asset class.
Not everyone sees it that way.
Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered's global head of digital assets research, told clients this week that he believes the worst is close to over. "The low is almost in," he wrote — a call that stands in sharp contrast to the pessimism currently dominating sentiment surveys, social media feeds, and derivatives positioning across crypto markets. His argument doesn't rest on macro tailwinds or broad-strokes optimism. It rests on three specific, near-term conditions that investors can track with a reasonable degree of precision.
Three Conditions, One Conclusion
- Strategy's Buyback History Could Flash the Clearest Signal
The most immediate catalyst Kendrick is watching involves Michael Saylor's Strategy — the Nasdaq-listed company that has turned aggressive bitcoin accumulation into a defining corporate identity and remains one of the single largest institutional holders of BTC in the world.
Last week, Strategy disclosed a sale of just 32 BTC, a transaction so modest it barely registered in the broader market. But Kendrick's interest is less in the sale itself and more in what tends to happen next. In December 2022, the last time Strategy sold bitcoin, the firm returned to the open market within 48 hours and bought back considerably more than it had divested. That pattern — a small sale followed swiftly by a far larger purchase — has since been read by crypto observers as a tactical treasury management technique.
Kendrick expects Strategy to repeat the move. He estimates the firm could acquire up to 100 times the 32 BTC it just sold, implying a potential purchase of roughly 3,200 BTC or more. If a filing confirming that transaction surfaces next Monday, he says he would treat it as a tentative signal that the market low is established.
For institutional observers who track Strategy's disclosures as a leading indicator of corporate bitcoin demand, a re-entry at current price levels would carry meaning well beyond the raw BTC count. The optics of a prominent, publicly listed buyer stepping in during a downturn tend to shift near-term sentiment in ways that outperform their quantitative footprint.
- ETF Holdings Have Barely Moved — And That Matters
The second element of Kendrick's thesis involves the behavior of the 11 U.S.-listed spot bitcoin ETFs, a market structure that simply did not exist during previous bear cycles and whose institutional character is only now being stress-tested in a meaningful way.
The surface data is uncomfortable. These funds have registered approximately $5 billion in combined net outflows over the past three weeks — a headline figure that has been used repeatedly to support the narrative of fading institutional conviction. Kendrick's reading of the numbers beneath that headline is considerably more reassuring.
Measured from inception in early 2024, cumulative net inflows across all 11 products remain at approximately $54.2 billion, broadly consistent with where that figure stood earlier this year. Total bitcoin held by these funds declined only marginally — from around 682,000 BTC to roughly 674,000 BTC — a contraction of less than 1.2%.
"They went up from 682k and then back down to now 674k — broadly unchanged," Kendrick noted. "This tells me that ETF holdings are more structurally strong than I had feared in February."
The significance extends beyond the numbers. The investors populating these ETF products — large institutional allocators, registered investment advisors, pension-adjacent wealth management platforms — operate with materially different time horizons than the retail traders and crypto-native speculators who dominated prior cycles. Their reluctance to exit en masse, even through three weeks of sustained price declines, suggests a base of holders with greater staying power than markets have previously seen at comparable stages of a correction.
In prior downturns, the absence of this kind of patient capital meant that sell-offs could deepen and extend with little structural resistance. That dynamic has shifted, quietly but meaningfully.
- The Fuel That Powers Bear Markets Is Running Low
The third condition is rooted in the mechanics of the futures market and how forced selling typically amplifies bitcoin downturns.
During this correction, exchanges have liquidated approximately $1.5 billion in leveraged long positions — a process in which traders who bet on higher prices are forced to close those positions when margin requirements go unmet, producing cascading sell orders that accelerate the very decline that triggered the liquidation. That figure is broadly in line with what occurred in January, which Kendrick uses as a reference point.
What matters more than the size of the liquidations, he contends, is the shrinking pool of over-leveraged positions that remain. Bitcoin has significantly underperformed equities through much of 2026, a year during which speculative positioning in crypto had already cooled from the elevated levels seen in late 2024 and early 2025. The inventory of highly leveraged longs — the positions that transform modest sell-offs into extended spirals — is, by his assessment, substantially smaller heading into this correction than it was before previous ones.
If that read is accurate, the mechanism that traditionally sustains and deepens crypto bear markets may simply be running out of material to work with. Less fuel means a shorter burn.
The $60,000 Question
For all the framework Kendrick is building, near-term trading will likely stay anchored to one number: $60,000.
Bitcoin is currently hovering in the low-$60,000s, and a clean break below that level would carry consequences both technical and psychological. Stop orders would activate, bearish headlines would multiply, and the ETF outflow narrative that Kendrick is currently dismissing could gain considerably more momentum if retail investors begin interpreting a six-figure floor breach as confirmation of a longer bear trend.
Several analysts are positioning for a potential retest of the $55,000–$58,000 range should selling pressure persist. The $60,000 line is, in a practical sense, where the competing bull and bear narratives for near-term price action meet most visibly.
A Chart Pattern With a Perfect Track Record
Technical analysts have been watching a separate but reinforcing signal. Bitcoin is trading close to its 200-week simple moving average — a long-horizon trend indicator whose track record in this specific asset has been remarkably consistent.
In each sustained bitcoin bear market over the past decade, price eventually found a floor in proximity to this average before mounting meaningful recoveries. It has served, with striking regularity, as the boundary between capitulation and the early stages of accumulation. Whether that pattern holds in an environment shaped by ETF products, corporate treasury buyers, and deepening institutional participation is a fair question. The structural changes in the market are significant enough that direct historical comparisons require caution.
But the convergence of a long-established technical support level with a three-condition fundamental framework pointing toward the same conclusion is the kind of alignment that tends to attract patient capital — even if it attracts it cautiously.
What Comes Next
Kendrick stops well short of pinpointing an exact bottom. He acknowledges too many variables remain unresolved. His message to clients is less a trade signal than a framework for probability: at these levels, the expected value of accumulation exceeds the expected value of waiting for certainty that may never arrive cleanly.
"I think when we look back at the end of 2026 with BTC at $100k and ETH at $4k, we will say this was the buying zone we all wanted," he wrote — a year-end forecast implying more than 60% upside from current levels and reflecting the structural conviction Standard Chartered has maintained throughout this drawdown.
Three near-term events will clarify the picture considerably. Whether Strategy files a major bitcoin purchase in the coming days. Whether ETF outflows stabilize or accelerate from their current trajectory. And whether the $60,000 support level holds long enough for the technical picture to find its footing.
Each outcome will either validate or complicate the thesis. What is certain is that the next few sessions will carry more informational weight than most weeks in the recent history of this market.
Disclosure: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrency markets are highly volatile. Past performance does not guarantee future results.