In this video, I looked at a smaller-account Bitcoin cohort, the newer or more retail side of the market, and compared two different language signals:
1. How convicted they sound when talking about Bitcoin
2. How optimistic they sound about where things are going
That combination matters because conviction by itself can be misleading.
Sometimes people are confidently bullish near tops. Sometimes they are confidently bearish near bottoms. The more interesting signal is what happens when conviction and optimism split apart.
Right now, smaller Bitcoin accounts are showing relatively high confidence, but unusually low optimism.
In plain English: a lot of retail traders do not just seem bearish. They seem confidently bearish.
That is interesting because this kind of setup has historically looked more like bottom behavior than euphoric top behavior. And with many crypto trader accounts calling the current move a dead-cat bounce, this is one of the more bullish sentiment signals I am watching.
Below is a lightly cleaned-up transcript of the video for anyone who would rather read than watch.
Transcript
Another day, another totally novel way to look at Bitcoin sentiment data.
I took one of my favorite cohorts, which is smaller accounts, the plebs, so to speak, the people who are relatively newer to Bitcoin. Then I analyzed every tweet I have from them by looking at conviction in their language.
Basically, how confident are they in the price predictions they are making? How pessimistic are they? How much are they hedging in their language?
That is represented by the gold and blue bar here.
When it is gold, like it was during the very aggressive run-up after the election, that means they are really confident. The language choices they are using are very convicted.
When it is blue, as you can see during some of the summer chop in 2024, that means they are much more hedged in their language.
It is interesting because you can really watch the moments when sentiment changes.
A couple of the more aggressive shifts happened around the November election period, when the vibes went from extremely low conviction to extremely high conviction in a short period of time.
Historically, that has been an incredibly strong counter-signal.
When people get really convicted, it often signals tops.
After conviction peaked there, people stayed very confident for a while, but as the market chopped for longer, the language became much more moderate.
Eventually, as we got to some of the next topping ranges, you can once again see very high levels of conviction, followed by a quick drop-off.
But that is not the novel part.
I have shown some of this before, and other people have done this kind of conviction analysis. Hedge funds look for anti-signals using this kind of language.
I wanted to do something a little more unique.
What I found was something interesting in the coherence between conviction language and the other moods I am tracking.
The new section here shows the optimism of that same group of smaller accounts over time.
What became interesting very quickly was the relationship between those two things.
Before the ETF approval, these smaller accounts had very high levels of conviction, but their optimism was generally pretty low.
What that suggests is that they were not necessarily confident Bitcoin was about to go much higher. They were more confident that prices might remain sideways.
And they were immediately proven wrong.
Then we can look at the blowoff after the election. People did not get extremely confident before the move. They got disproportionately confident after it happened.
You can see the same thing in the mood data. Optimism rose around the highs, when people became both confident and optimistic at the same time.
After that, conviction dropped off again.
Then, as Bitcoin ran back up toward the highs, we saw more conviction, but something different stood out. We actually saw very low optimism during this high compared to the first one.
That was an underlying mood shift I do not think I personally recognized at the time.
Back in December 2024, things were extremely optimistic. I remember feeling very optimistic personally about where the market was going.
But when Bitcoin broke all-time highs later, into the end of summer 2025 and then into the October 2025 high, the smaller accounts showed very low conviction and very high optimism.
They were optimistic, but they were still hedging a lot.
They did not really use the kind of language you would normally see from someone with a strong belief and strong conviction in that belief.
That happened right around the top, which I found really intriguing. It is now something I am going to watch much more closely.
That brings me to the thing I want to close with today, which is the most interesting part and perhaps the most bullish.
Looking closer at the present market, Bitcoin recently ran up. We bottomed around $60K, and we have been consistently chopping back upward.
People are very conflicted on Twitter right now, so I wanted to look closely at how these smaller accounts are thinking about this.
There are two things happening at the same time.
Their net confidence level is actually pretty high. They are quite confident, much more confident than they were back at the previous top.
But interestingly, that is coupled with low levels of optimism.
Some of the lowest optimism levels we have seen in quite a long time.
That is unique because this has typically happened closer to bottoms.
On Twitter right now, there are a lot of crypto trader accounts convinced we are in a prolonged bear market and that this is just a dead-cat bounce.
That is backed up by some of this data.
You can see very high conviction from accounts that have traditionally been wrong at important moments, while the bulk of them are much more bearish than normal.
To me, that makes this an incredibly optimistic time for Bitcoin, despite what some of these retail traders are saying.
