Peter Brandt Says Bitcoin's All-Time High May Never Be Topped In His Lifetime If Bearish Chart Pattern Holds

• Peter Brandt said on Saturday that he could build a technical case that Bitcoin’s all-time high was already behind.
• Brandt’s chart showed Bitcoin at $62,830, down about 16% for the week.
• But according to James Thorne, the pattern was “intact,” with a left shoulder at $59,000.

Veteran trader Peter Brandt said late Saturday that Bitcoin’s (BTC) record high set last year may never be surpassed in his lifetime if a bearish head-and-shoulders (H&S) pattern on the cryptocurrency’s weekly chart holds.

Brandt posted the chart on X and asked whether it showed a “legit H&S top.” If it was, he said, he could build a technical case that Bitcoin’s all-time high (ATH) was already behind it. “The ATH is in, not to be surpassed at least in my lifetime,” he wrote.

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A head-and-shoulders top has three peaks, with the middle one the highest. Traders often read it as a sign that a rally is ending. Brandt’s chart showed Bitcoin at $62,830, down about 16% for the week and trading roughly 50% below its record of over $126,000 set in October last year.

Brandt returned to the pattern, posting a linear-scale version of the chart, which put the pattern’s measured downside target at negative $10,487. “On a linear scale the downside target is a big minus number,” he wrote, adding that logarithmic scale “must be used” to work out the target. 

Thorne Sees A Bullish Bottom

Not everyone, however, read that chart as a top. James Thorne, chief market strategist at Wellington-Altus, saw a bullish inverse head-and-shoulders instead. According to Thorne, the pattern was “intact,” with a left shoulder at $59,000, a head at $57,000, and a right shoulder “forming now.”

Thorne said Bitcoin needed to reclaim $73,000 and confirm a move above $87,000. From there, he targeted $117,000 by mid-2027, then a break of the record and $150,000 to $170,000 by the end of that year. “This washout was leverage, not fundamentals. Buy the fear,” he wrote. Below $57,000, he said, he would be wrong.

ETF Outflows Keep Mounting

Selling has also shown up in U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), as SoSoValue data showed that investors pulled about $2.35 billion from the funds over the two weeks through Friday, marking one of the largest two-week outflows, according to data from Coinglass. 

BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) led the outflows, logging eleven straight sessions of outflows, which accounted for roughly 90% of November's total spot Bitcoin ETF outflows.

Anthropic IPO Adds To Bitcoin Selling Pressure

Some analysts saw another reason for the selling. Tom Lee said on Saturday that retail investors may be cashing out ahead of Anthropic's (ANT) Nasdaq debut. A week before the SpaceX (SPCX) IPO in June, Bitcoin had fallen nearly 29%, hitting roughly $60,000. 

Anthropic is set to start trading next week. However, the anticipated IPO was not the only pressure on crypto. Bitcoin fell below $74,000 on Tuesday, after hotter-than-expected inflation data lifted bets on a Federal Reserve rate hike in December.

On Stocktwits, Bitcoin was one of the top trending tickers among cryptocurrencies at the time of writing. 

Bitcoin’s price was trading at $65,700, down over 1.98% over the past day. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around BTC remained in the ‘extremely bearish’ zone, as chatter around it stayed at ‘high’ levels over the past day.

Read more: Jordi Visser Sees December Fed Decision As Bitcoin’s Next Catalyst, Questions Wall Street’s Nvidia Downgrades

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