• The reading exceeds the 51% and 67% recorded in the previous bear market's two corrections.

• The 2019-2020 correction drove the same gauge to 97%, 24 points above the current figure.

• An October 31 measurement put the underwater share of short-term supply at 51.3%.

73% of Recent Buyers Underwater

Roughly 73% of the Bitcoin (BTC) supply held by short-term buyers now trades below its acquisition cost, according to the short-term holder profit and loss indicator, known as STH-PSIL, that analyst Murphy published in a post on Sunday. The gauge tracks the share of coins held about five months or less that sit at an unrealized loss; it does not count individual investors, and it does not register losses already locked in by selling. Murphy wrote that the current decline has badly damaged investor confidence. The reading clears both benchmarks set during the previous bear market: two separate corrections in that cycle pushed the same measure to 51% and then 67%, first as interest-rate increases stacked up and then as a traditional banking crisis hit. Today's print sits 22 percentage points above the first of those readings and 6 points above the second. A higher watermark stands further back: the first correction of the 2019-2020 window drove the gauge to 97%, an episode that coincided with the COVID-19 shock. The current figure is 24 percentage points below that extreme. Short-term holders are, by convention, the buyers who accumulated over the past five months, the cohort most sensitive to drawdowns and the likeliest to sell into a relief rally. The Bitcoin price itself moved little after the post went up: our live monitoring shows it near $64,859 early on Sunday, down 3.3% over 24 hours and up just 0.1% since the reading was published. Our composite support and resistance scoring, which grades each level from the indicators that converge there, puts the strongest floor at $62,972, scored 87 out of 100, where a Fibonacci level, a high-volume node, the lower Donchian band and the lower Bollinger band all meet. The nearest resistance above the market sits at $65,746, scored 72/100. Spot trades between the two, and the 87-scored floor is the level that has to hold for this range to survive. Positioning looks mildly defensive: perpetual funding prints at -0.0009%, while long accounts outnumber shorts 3.28 to 1. The Fear and Greed Index reads 10 out of 100, extreme fear, and the 22.26 RSI leaves the tape oversold on our Bitcoin technical analysis read.

Two Weeks From 51.3% to 73%

The speed of the deterioration stands out as much as the level itself. An earlier measurement on October 31 put the underwater share of short-term supply at 51.3%; the same gauge now reads 73%, a climb of almost 22 percentage points in two weeks. The rise tracked a steady slide in spot rather than a single capitulation day, with a 13.7% weekly loss setting the pace. Where the ladder of past readings points is the more consequential question. Recent buyers are hurting more than they did in either correction of the last bear market, yet the cycle has not approached the panic ceiling of 2019-2020, a window that ran through the Bitcoin halving of 2020 and ended with the gauge at 97%. For today's print to match that extreme, the underwater share would still have to climb another 24 percentage points. Two limits on the reading deserve note: the indicator measures cost basis, not seller identity, so it says nothing about whether whales are distributing from large stashes, and the coins it covers belong to the cohort least inclined to HODL through a drawdown. Structural pressure has compounded the on-chain picture elsewhere in the Bitcoin market. Index provider MSCI has excluded Bitcoin treasury firms Strategy and Metaplanet from its indexes, and weekend sessions have carried outsized weight in this leg, with one earlier desk note flagging concentrated weekend selling as the price bounced to $65,300.

Murphy's own comparison closes the file for now: worse than the last bear market, still short of the worst episode on record.