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Cost Basis Regime Plane

The same six states, drawn as a map instead of a timeline. Two coordinates place the market: how far new money sits from the market average, and how far recent holders sit from it. Three lines carve the plane into the six sectors, and the market's path traces a loop through them over a cycle. Plotting the current cycle over the previous ones turns the question of where we stand compared with last time into something you read off a map rather than reconstruct from memory. Distance from a boundary is as informative as which side of it you are on.

Tier proCycle intelligencecost-basisregimephase-planemulti-cyclecycle-positionpro

What is it?

The same six states as the regime map, drawn as a map of positions instead of a timeline. Two measurements locate the market. The vertical axis is the distance between the cost basis of the newest money and the market average. The horizontal axis is the distance between the cost basis of recent holders and that same average. Both are expressed as percentages, so early cycles at low prices and recent cycles at high prices land on the same scale and can be compared directly. Three lines carve this plane into six sectors, one per state. The horizontal line marks where new money equals the market average. The vertical line marks where recent holders equal it. The diagonal marks where new money equals recent holders. Which sector you occupy is your state; how far you sit from the nearest line is how firmly you occupy it. Over a full cycle, the market traces a loop through these sectors. Drawing the current cycle on top of the previous ones turns the recurring question of where we stand compared with last time into something that can be read off a map, rather than reconstructed from memory or from a list of dates.

How to read

Find the marked point: that is the present. Read its sector for the state, and its distance from the nearest boundary for how decisive that state is. A point sitting almost on a line is a market about to change character or hesitating; a point deep inside a sector is a settled structure. The trail behind the point is the recent path, smoothed over thirty days then sampled weekly: without that, the daily noise in acquisition prices produces zigzags that make the figure unreadable. The direction of travel carries as much information as the position: moving away from the centre means the cost bases are separating, moving toward it means they are converging, and convergence is what precedes a change of sector. On opening, only the current cycle is drawn: four overlaid paths read poorly even once smoothed. Previous cycles switch on with one click in the legend, each in its own tone. They are not predictions and the current cycle has no obligation to follow them. They answer a narrower and more useful question: has this configuration occurred before, and what did the path around it look like? The centre of the plane, where both coordinates are near zero, is where all three cost bases agree. Markets pass through it quickly, because agreement between a fast-moving average and a slow-moving one is unstable by nature. One consequence is worth knowing before it surprises you: the state named in the header can differ from the sector the current point sits in. The sectors are the raw ordering of the three cost bases, while the named state only changes once the smallest of the three distances clears a five percent dead band. Near a boundary the point crosses first and the label follows later, or does not follow at all if the crossing does not hold. That lag is deliberate. Without it the state would change roughly three times more often and the reading would become noise.

Key zones

The plane divides along three lines, and each side means something specific. • Above the horizontal line, the newest money is paying more than the market average. Below it, the newest money needs a discount to the average to transact. • Right of the vertical line, recent holders are above the market average, which mechanically means a large recent cohort is carrying an unrealised loss whenever price sits below them. Left of it, the recent cohort has already repriced downward. • Above the diagonal, today's demand is paying more than the demand of recent months. Below it, the opposite. The upper right region combines all three in the constructive direction. The lower left combines them in the other. The two off-diagonal corners are the interesting ones, because they describe markets pulling in two directions at once: fresh demand appearing while the recent cohort is still underwater, or a recent cohort still above the market while fresh demand has already withdrawn.

What to observe

• Where the current point sits relative to the same point in earlier cycles. Similar sectors reached by different paths have historically behaved differently. • Whether the trail is heading toward a boundary or away from it. Approach speed matters more than position alone. • How far the loop extends. Cycles that pushed deep into the extremes and cycles that stayed compressed near the centre are different market structures, and the plane makes the amplitude directly visible. • Time spent per sector, visible as the density of the trail. Points bunched together mean the market lingered; points spread apart mean it moved through quickly. • Whether earlier cycles turned around in the same region. Repeated turning points in one area are worth noting, while keeping in mind how few complete cycles exist to compare.

Historical context

Expressing both axes as percentages rather than absolute amounts is what makes cross-cycle comparison possible at all. In absolute terms the early cycles are invisible next to the recent ones. In relative terms they are directly comparable, and the loops turn out to be broadly similar in shape while differing in amplitude. Cycle boundaries here follow the halving schedule, which is arithmetic rather than interpretation. This avoids the circularity of defining cycles by tops and bottoms that are themselves identified after the fact, and it means the boundaries never move as new data arrives. The number of complete cycles available for comparison is small. This is the fundamental limit of all cycle analysis on this asset, and no amount of processing removes it. The plane is a way of seeing the past clearly, not a way of manufacturing statistical power that the sample size does not contain.

Expert notes

The two coordinates are logarithmic ratios, which gives the plane a useful property: the diagonal boundary, where new money equals recent holders, is exactly the line where the vertical coordinate equals the horizontal one. The third relationship is therefore the difference between the two axes rather than an independent third dimension, which is why six sectors on a plane suffice to represent all six states without any loss. Using logarithmic ratios also makes the picture symmetric. A cost basis twice the market average and one at half the market average sit at equal distances from the centre, in opposite directions. Arithmetic percentages would compress one side and stretch the other, and the visual weight of the extremes would be misleading. Because neither axis is time, this chart cannot express duration. That is intentional and it is why the companion duration chart exists. Reading the two together answers where and for how long, which neither answers alone.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Treating the overlaid past cycles as a route the current one will follow. They are a record of what happened, not a path. • Reading proximity on the plane as proximity in time. Two points can be neighbours on the map and years apart. • Forgetting that the centre is unstable. A market near the centre is not balanced in any restful sense; it is at a point it will leave shortly. • Assuming a sector has a fixed duration. The plane says nothing about how long anything lasts. • Over-reading the corners. Extreme coordinates are rare, which also means very few historical examples support any statement about them. • Mistaking the boundaries for support and resistance. They are equalities between averages, not price levels, and nothing prevents a market from sitting astride one.

Programmatic access

REST API

curl -sS \
  'https://api.trinityinsights.io/api/v1/cycle-intelligence/metrics/cycle-cost-basis-regime-plane/data?timeframe=90d' \
  -H 'X-API-Key: $TRINITY_API_KEY'

MCP server

{
  "tool": "get_chart_value",
  "metric_id": "cycle-cost-basis-regime-plane",
  "timeframe": "1y"
}

Required tier: pro. See the pricing grid for the tier list and the MCP documentation for multi-client configuration.

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Institutional disclaimer

Trinity Insights is an educational and analytical tool. The metric above does not constitute investment advice. Trinity Insights is not a Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) registered under MiCA Regulation (EU) 2023/1114. See the full disclaimer.