How to Read Bitcoin’s 50-, 100- and 200-Day Moving Averages: What a “Bullish Alignment” Measures, What It Misses, and Why the 100-Day Is $56 Below the 200-Day Today (Field Guide 50)

CoinDesk wrote on Monday 5 October that bitcoin’s “50-, 100-, and 200-day moving averages are converging toward their first fully bullish alignment since 2025” (Crypto Week Ahead). A line like that travels fast and is rarely unpacked. What does “fully bullish alignment” require? How close is bitcoin? Is it a forecast, or a description? This guide answers those questions with the numbers as of the 5 October close, shows you how to calculate it yourself in about five minutes, and tests the idea against what happened the last time it appeared.

The short answer: bitcoin meets two of the three conditions, and the third is missing by $56. The 100-day average is $71,525; the 200-day is $71,581. The longer answer is more useful.

Step 1: what a simple moving average actually is

A simple moving average (SMA) of N days is the arithmetic mean of the last N daily closing prices. A 50-day SMA adds up the last 50 closes and divides by 50. Each day the oldest close drops out and the newest is added. That is all it is — no forecast, no weighting, no hidden inputs. Everything else in this guide follows from that definition.

Two practical consequences. First, the number depends on which price series you use. A “daily close” on Coinbase is the price at 00:00 UTC; on another exchange or index it may be a slightly different price at a different hour. The figures here use Coinbase Exchange daily candles (public data), and your charting package will differ by tens or hundreds of dollars. Second, because each new value replaces an old one, an average moves by what leaves as well as by what arrives. Keep that in mind; it matters in Step 3.

Step 2: what the three windows are trying to measure

The three common windows act as fast, medium and slow memory of the market. The 50-day (about seven weeks) reacts to the recent trend. The 100-day (about fourteen weeks) is a quarter-length view. The 200-day (about 28 weeks) is the long-run reference that traders have used for decades because it changes slowly and is hard to move. The table shows the values at the 5 October close and how quickly each is moving.

The ordering by speed is the point: the faster average turns first, and the slowest turns last. When the 50-day is above the 100-day, which is above the 200-day, the recent past is, on average, higher than the more distant past — an uptrend as the averages define it.

Step 3: the three conditions of a “fully bullish alignment”

Chart commentators usually mean four items stacked in order, from top to bottom: price, the 50-day, the 100-day and the 200-day. That is three comparisons: price above the 50-day, the 50-day above the 100-day, and the 100-day above the 200-day. Here is where bitcoin stands on this desk’s Coinbase calculation:

Bitcoin is therefore one comparison short. Now apply the lesson from Step 1. The 100-day average will change at tonight’s UTC close by adding the new close and dropping the close from 28 June ($59,474). The 200-day average will add the same new close and drop the close from 20 March ($70,497). Because the value leaving the 100-day window is $11,000 lower than the value leaving the 200-day window, the 100-day average will gain on the 200-day almost regardless of today’s price. Solving the arithmetic, the 100-day moves above the 200-day at the 6 October close unless bitcoin closes below about $59,700 — roughly 30% below where it trades this morning. That is arithmetic, not a forecast of price, and it is why CoinDesk’s word “converging” is fair: the alignment is largely a matter of the calendar.

If it happens, nothing about the market will have changed by the end of Tuesday. The signal would be a by-product of how old prices roll out of the window. It is worth knowing that before you read a headline calling it a breakout.

Step 4: golden crosses, death crosses and the lag problem

A “golden cross” is when the 50-day average rises above the 200-day; a “death cross” is the reverse. Bitcoin has had one of each in the last year, and the history is a good test of how much information they carry. Everything below uses Coinbase closes; our series has 200 closes available from 18 June 2025.

Read the table for what it shows and what it does not. The death cross of 16 November 2025 arrived with bitcoin already 24.5% below its record close, and the price kept falling another 37.9% over the next seven and a half months. The golden cross of 8 September 2026 arrived with the price 35.9% above the 1 July low, and was followed by a 10.4% gain over the next 13 days. That looks like signal. But there are two data points, both in a series we picked after the fact, and both crosses came after most of the move had already happened. Moving averages are lagging indicators by construction: they summarise the past, so they confirm a trend after it is underway.

Step 5: the whipsaw problem, and the last time bitcoin was “fully aligned”

Averages work least well when price hovers near them. Between 17 October and 3 November 2025, bitcoin crossed its 200-day average seven times in 18 days (the average was then between about $107,500 and $109,900): below on the 17th, above on the 19th, below on the 22nd, above on the 23rd, below on the 30th, above on the 31st, and below again on 3 November. Each of those crossings looked like a signal, and each reversed within days. A rule such as “buy when price crosses above the 200-day” would have produced seven entries and exits in that stretch.

The last stretch of fully bullish alignment is also instructive. On this desk’s calculation the stack of price above the 50-day, above the 100-day, above the 200-day was in place on 67 of the 90 days from 24 June to 21 September 2025. On the final day, 21 September, bitcoin closed at $115,282 against a 50-day of $114,446, a 100-day of $113,193 and a 200-day of $103,501. The next day it closed at $112,737, below the 50-day, and the alignment technically ended — fifteen days before bitcoin closed at its record of $124,720 on 6 October. The indicator did not predict the top, and it did not predict the highest close that followed its end. It described what the previous few months had looked like.

The video above, published in May 2026 by Trading Bureau, is a beginner explanation of moving averages for crypto traders. It is third-party educational material, included for readers who prefer to see the chart built step by step; it is not an endorsement of any trading approach.

Step 6: how to calculate it yourself in five minutes

1. Choose one price series and stay with it. Download daily closes for BTC-USD from one exchange or charting service into a spreadsheet. Do not mix sources inside one calculation.
2. Add three formula columns. In the row for each date, use =AVERAGE() over the last 50, 100 and 200 closes, including that day’s close. Start only at the 200th row so every average has a full window.
3. Test the stack. In a fourth column, flag the row when the close is above the 50-day average, the 50-day is above the 100-day and the 100-day is above the 200-day. That is the alignment condition in this guide.
4. Check yourself against the chart. In a charting tool such as TradingView, add three “Moving Average” indicators set to Simple, length 50, 100 and 200, on the daily timeframe. Your spreadsheet should match to within a small amount; if it does not, the sources differ in closing time or the chart is showing a partial day.
5. Exclude the unfinished candle. A daily candle that has not closed is not a close. Using it makes every average wobble through the day.
6. Record the date and the closing price whenever the flag changes, so you can later see what followed each signal and how often it reversed.

Six checks before you trust the phrase “bullish alignment”

1. Which series? Coinbase, another exchange, or an index? A $56 gap between two averages is smaller than the difference between venues on a volatile day.
2. Which averages? Simple or exponential? Exponential averages give more weight to recent closes and cross earlier, so the same chart can read differently.
3. How far is price from the average? At the 5 October close bitcoin was 7.9% above its 50-day and 19.8% above its 200-day. Being far above is not the same as being safely above; a decline of 7.3% to $79,484 would put it back on the 50-day.
4. Are the averages sloping up? They are: roughly +$443, +$246 and +$64 a day for the 50-, 100- and 200-day. A flat average is a different picture from a rising one.
5. Is there a recent whipsaw? Count price crossings of the 200-day in the last 60 days. Bitcoin has had one since 19 August, which is unusually clean compared with the seven in October and November 2025.
6. What is driving it? The rally from $76,349 to $86,595 came in two sessions on 18 and 21 September, tied to ETF inflows of about $999 million on one of them and short liquidations, as we show in our analysis of bitcoin one year after the peak. An alignment built on two days is a different thing from one built on a steady climb.

What would break the alignment, and what to watch

The practical question is how far bitcoin would need to fall for the stack to fail. The nearest line is the 50-day average at $79,484 (7.3% below Monday’s close). The 50-day is rising by about $443 a day; if bitcoin simply traded flat near $85,300 for ten sessions, the 50-day would be about $81,700 and the 100- and 200-day about $73,900 and $72,400. So the distance between price and the 50-day shrinks every day that price goes sideways, and the level that counts as “breaking” the alignment rises.

For the current market backdrop — the weak September jobs report, the Fed’s first hike since 2023, and the 10-year yield at 5.31% — see today’s market report. For how the macro releases themselves are read, see our guides to the jobs report, which jobs data moves rates and reading Treasury yield headlines; for the leverage side of rallies, see how to read a short squeeze. All field guides in this series are indexed in the Reading Room hub.

The summary of what a moving-average alignment tells you: it tells you the recent past has been higher than the distant past, in an ordered way. It does not tell you what comes next, it lags by construction, it can be produced by old prices simply rolling out of a window, and in a range-bound market it can reverse within days. Use it as a description of the trend you have already seen, and pair it with what is actually moving the price.

Data sources: Coinbase Exchange daily candles (API) for bitcoin closes and every moving average in this guide; CoinDesk (5 October 2026) for the “bullish alignment” quotation; Ted Pillows (5 October 2026) for resistance and support levels cited elsewhere in this series.

Method: bitcoin prices, daily highs, lows and closes in this article are Coinbase Exchange BTC-USD daily candles (UTC day), pulled by Bitcoin Mastery at about 06:10 UTC on Tuesday 6 October 2026; the 6 October candle is still open at that time, so every close quoted is the 5 October close unless stated. Treasury yields are the U.S. Treasury’s own daily par yield curve (constant-maturity) series. Third-party figures are attributed to their source and date, and where two sources disagree both are printed. Moving averages are simple averages of Coinbase daily closes and will differ slightly on other venues.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are volatile and you can lose some or all of the money you put in. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold bitcoin, any exchange-traded fund, any listed security or any other asset, and the technical levels, probabilities and scenarios discussed are descriptions of published data, not forecasts. Do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.