Fidelity's Timmer Calls a New Four-Year Bitcoin Bull Market

Bitcoin crossed the $87,000 mark for the first time since late January, and Fidelity Investments' director of global macro, Jurrien Timmer, says a new four-year bull cycle is underway.

Timmer laid out his case in a lengthy post on X on Sep. 18 — the same day Bitcoin reclaimed the $80,000 level after almost a year below it. That duration, he argued, is typical for a Bitcoin winter. His conclusion: the drawdown has run its course and a fresh four-year cycle has begun.

The chart behind the call

Timmer backed the call with Bitcoin's power law chart incorporating the BTC-gold Z-Score, a measure of how far the current Bitcoin-to-gold ratio sits from its historical mean. The score has spent a long stretch in negative territory and only recently turned positive, he noted. Historically, that inflection has marked market bottoms.

The macro backdrop adds weight to the read. Last week brought two headwinds: the Senate failed a cloture vote on the CLARITY Act, and the Federal Reserve delivered its first interest rate hike since 2023.

Washington pivots to crypto

The Donald Trump administration responded with a rapid sequence of pro-crypto measures.

The SEC introduced a five-year "Innovation Exemption" designed to create a pathway for qualifying platforms to trade tokenized U.S. stocks onchain. The CFTC issued a no-action position covering certain software developers who connect users to regulated crypto exchanges.

On Capitol Hill, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee passed the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, which addresses crypto tax reforms. Separately, the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services approved the American Reserve Modernization Act of 2026 (H.R. 8957), legislation to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve and a digital asset stockpile.

Those moves, coming immediately after the CLARITY cloture failure, sparked a significant Bitcoin rally over the past several days, culminating in the push above $87,000. At the time of writing, Bitcoin traded at $86,193, according to Decibel.

The so-what

If Timmer's four-year cycle framework holds, the recent Z-Score turn — a bottom signal with historical precedent — suggests the rally has room to run rather than marking a local top. The market's next test is whether legislative follow-through on the House-approved reserve and tax bills sustains the momentum that regulatory goodwill ignited.