Just been thinking about something pretty fundamental that most traders seem to get wrong. Market cycles aren't random – they're almost mechanical in how they repeat. I pulled up this old chart showing decades of patterns, and honestly, it's kind of wild how predictable things become once you zoom out.

So here's the thing about periods when to make money. There are basically three phases that keep cycling through. First you get the panic years – think 1927, 1945, 1965, 1981, 1999, 2019. These are the crash moments where everyone's scared shitless, prices are bleeding out, but that's actually when the real opportunities show up. Most people are too emotional to see it though.

Then there's the euphoria phase. The good times when everything feels like it's going up forever. 1929, 1936, 1953, 1965, 1989, 2007. Assets are ridiculously expensive, markets feel invincible, and here's the key – this is when you should actually be selling and locking in your gains. But most people do the opposite. They FOMO in harder.

And then the third phase, the one that actually builds wealth. The hard times with cheap prices. 1924, 1932, 1942, 1958, 1969, 1985, 2002, 2020. This is when sentiment is absolutely brutal, everyone's depressed about markets, but these are the years where you're actually stacking assets at discounts. This is where generational wealth gets built.

The pattern is almost too simple: buy when there's fear, sell when there's euphoria. Every crash is just setting up the next bull run, and every bull run eventually crashes. It's not complicated, but it requires patience and discipline that most people don't have.

We're in 2026 now, and it's interesting to watch how this is playing out in real time. The question everyone's asking is whether crypto actually breaks this cycle or if we're just following the same old script. My gut says the cycle holds, but I could be wrong. What's your take – you think the pattern continues or is crypto different this time?