I wanted to quickly highlight my biases over time for BTC.
It does seem like I cannot accurately predict the tops and am pretty much a permabull. However recently I have gotten better at predicting local tops. I was bearish at 70k, but held onto my bullish bias because I was long from 38-44k and thought price would revert back to bullishness much earlier than at 56k levels. I was wrong. I do want to say that just because I am bearish doesn't mean I will sell everything. In a bull market, I typically like to hold onto my positions with a death grip and sell only after I believe we have hit the top for this cycle. That is in part why I did not sell 70k and remained bullish despite the tape being bearish.
I am also much better as a forecaster than I was in 2017-2021. If I was sent back in time with no memories of price action but the skills I have today, I would have 100% sold the 2021 top. I may have held through the initial 60k -30k top though.
It does seem like I cannot accurately predict the tops and am pretty much a permabull. However recently I have gotten better at predicting local tops. I was bearish at 70k, but held onto my bullish bias because I was long from 38-44k and thought price would revert back to bullishness much earlier than at 56k levels. I was wrong. I do want to say that just because I am bearish doesn't mean I will sell everything. In a bull market, I typically like to hold onto my positions with a death grip and sell only after I believe we have hit the top for this cycle. That is in part why I did not sell 70k and remained bullish despite the tape being bearish.
I am also much better as a forecaster than I was in 2017-2021. If I was sent back in time with no memories of price action but the skills I have today, I would have 100% sold the 2021 top. I may have held through the initial 60k -30k top though.
I encourage you to build up your pattern recognition on the shorter timeframes, but keep in mind that trying to trade the short timeframes is very difficult and luck based (as you can push the price 0.5% with a few million dollars, and a lot of people have a few million dollars, so these small moves are a lot more random than a larger multi month move).
If you watch the charts for 3 years, being careful not to miss a single day, you will most likely be able to forecast a future move based on technicals alone. Bitcoin and other memecoins / altcoins are very technically dependent, because it's not like a bond where you have to really anticipate macro events. Bitcoin and altcoins are only worth what speculators believe they are worth in a pure supply / demand fashion, so just by watching technicals you have a good idea of direction. (not to say Bitcoin is not influenced by macro, it is).
Do keep in mind the market constantly evolves, and during the bitmex days there would be long periods of consolidation and it was easy to forecast the next move. Barts were also commonplace, and counter trading funding was very easy. Now it is more camouflaged, though the general principles still work.
As a rule, always watch a market for a while to get an idea of how it works. Jumping directly into an altcoin market is probably not the best idea. Spend a few days watching the markets and getting an idea of the flow.