200-Week Moving Average Heatmap

The chart plots Bitcoin's daily close as a series of segments, each colour-coded by the four-week percentage change of the 200-week simple moving average on that day. The 200-week MA itself is overlaid as the lower of the two darker lines — Bitcoin's slowest support line on this site, set at exactly 1,400 daily closes. The colour scale runs cold to hot: near-zero rate of change at the low end, above ten percent per four weeks at the high end. The lower pane shows that rate of change directly, so the colour assignment is auditable rather than asserted.

Today the 200-week MA stands at $62,006.76. It is rising at 1.53% over the most recent four weeks, which places the network in the Cold band. Spot is 1.06× the MA.

The input is the daily Bitcoin USD close history (see data sources). For every day t:

200WMA(t) = mean(price[t−1399..t])
delta_4w(t) = (200WMA(t) − 200WMA(t−28)) / 200WMA(t−28) × 100

The first row with a fully-formed 200WMA lands on day 1,400 of the price history (18 May 2014); rows before that are excluded from the chart. The four-week rate of change is unitless (percentage per four weeks) and is the value the heatmap maps to colour. Thresholds at 2%, 4%, 6%, 8%, 10% bracket the historical bottoming and topping windows but are not author-canonical — PlanB's original 2019 post described the colour mapping as month-on-month percentage change without publishing exact breakpoints. Full derivation lives on the methodology page.

The window is exactly 1,400 daily closes, not 200 × (5- or 7-trading-day weeks): Bitcoin trades every day, so calendar weeks and trading weeks coincide. The rate-of-change window is four calendar weeks (28 days), again to keep the metric calendar-aligned rather than market-day-aligned.

Two readings carry the chart. The first is spot's distance from the 200-week MA — the ratio in the reading row above. Below 1.0× has historically tagged the start of an accumulation window; staying within 1.0–2.0× is the typical mid-cycle envelope; past 4× is late-cycle territory. The second is the colour band: cold means the MA itself is flat, which is structurally consistent with a bottoming phase; hot means the MA is being repriced upward fast, which is structurally consistent with late-cycle acceleration. The bands above carry the historical context for each colour.

Sampling our seven canonical cycle anchors against the rate-of-change pane shows the pattern directly. Cycle bottoms cluster in the cold band, cycle tops cluster in the warm bands; the 2024 pre-halving high in March stayed below the late-cycle extreme that 2017 and 2021 each visited, an early signal of the muted cycle the data has gone on to print. The 200-week MA values, deltas, and price-to-MA ratios in the table are computed inline from the chart's own series, not hard-coded.

The 200-week MA grows monotonically in log space across nearly the entire price history. The few exceptions — brief flatlines in mid-2015, late-2018, and mid-2022 — are themselves cycle-bottom signals. A 1,400-day window is long enough to absorb any individual quarter; the MA can only flatline if the rolling window has dropped a higher-priced run from the back end while the front end has been treading water. That co-occurrence has only happened at cycle troughs.

The MA can only accelerate to the “hot” bands when the front-end of the window is meaningfully higher than the equivalent prior-cycle prints rolling off. Late 2017 saw four-week MA growth run well above 12%; the spring-2021 surge ran above 10% into the extreme band; the November 2021 cycle top, by contrast, registered only in the moderate band, below the extreme threshold; and March 2024's pre-halving high passed without the MA's growth even reaching 6%. (The 200-week MA series begins in May 2014, so the 2013 top sits before this chart's rate-of-change pane.)

One observation worth surfacing on its own: the 2024 cycle has yet to print a “hot” band. The 14 March 2024 pre-halving high registered around 4% / 4w — squarely inside the cool-mid band. The October 2025 ATH that followed printed at a rate of change in the same range. By the standard the prior three cycles set, that is a quiet cycle; an indicator that historically “flashed sell” at every cycle top has not yet flashed at this one. Whether that means the cycle has not topped or that the heatmap's calibration no longer fits the post-ETF era is the live question. We surface both readings — the price line and the underlying rate of change — so a reader can form their own view.

1. The colour thresholds are not author-canonical — so “hot” is implementation-dependent. PlanB's January 2019 framing — “depending on the month-by-month % increase of the 200 week moving average, a colour is assigned to the price chart” (reference page) — describes the colour mapping qualitatively. It does not publish exact percentage breakpoints, so two implementations can colour the same week differently. Compare dates yourself against the rate-of-change pane; we expose it for exactly this reason.

2. It is a confirmation indicator, not a timing one — every signal arrives late. A 1,400-day window cannot react to a cycle change in fewer than weeks. The November 2022 post-FTX low traded at roughly 0.7× the MA — the deepest below-200WMA print on record — yet the MA itself only stopped rising and flattened into the cold band after the price had already bottomed. At the top end, both the December 2017 and November 2021 peaks spent weeks in the warm bands before reversing. The chart confirms regimes; it does not call turns. Matt Crosby summed up the broader 2024 case in late 2025: long-cycle indicators “remained untested” this cycle (Crosby, Dec 2025). The 200WMA's silence is consistent with that category-wide silence.

3. It assumes a four-year halving cadence — which 2024–2025 may have broken. The chart's entire historical edge rests on the cycle topping with a parabolic, MA-accelerating final leg. The March 2024 pre-halving high and the October 2025 all-time high both printed around 4% / 4w — the cool-mid band, not the hot band the MA reached at the 2017 top and the spring-2021 surge. Lyn Alden's reframing of the Bitcoin cycle as a global-liquidity cycle rather than a halving cycle (via Crypto Briefing, 2025) implies that the long-window cycle indicators built around the four-year cadence — this one, Pi Cycle, the Golden-Ratio Multiplier — may need recalibration as ETFs and regulation reshape the demand cycle. If the next top arrives without a hot MA, the heatmap will have missed its first cycle.

If you accumulate on a schedule, the cold band is the discount this indicator surfaces — every cycle bottom on record (2015, 2018–19, 2022) sits inside it, and price has pierced the line to as deep as 0.7× only at the November 2022 low. A steady weekly buy across any cold-band stretch dollar-cost-averages into the mid-band of the subsequent recovery. There is nothing to time around the chart; the slowness of the 200-week MA is the feature.

If you are trying to time the cycle, use the line crossings, not the colour, as your trigger and confirm elsewhere. Spot crossing the 200-week MA has historically marked regime changes — reclaiming the line in 2015 and 2019 each preceded multi-year bull runs; the brief downside crossings in 2015, the 2020 COVID crash and the 2022 bear each marked accumulation windows. But the colour will not call a top in time. Pair the chart with at least two of Pi Cycle, MVRV‑Z, and the Golden-Ratio Multiplier.