Bitcoin Trades At 40% Discount As ‘Triple Put’ Unfolds: Hedge Fund Founder

Bitcoin is changing hands at prices almost 40% below its modeled “energy value,” yet an unusual confluence of technical, fundamental and policy signals suggests the market may be turning, according to Charles Edwards, founder of the quantitative crypto hedge fund Capriole Investments. In his latest newsletter, Edwards argues that a newly-formed “Triple Put”—simultaneous backstops from the White House, the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury—has altered the risk profile for all risk assets just as on-chain and macro indicators for Bitcoin flip decisively higher.

Bitcoin Flips Bullish

Edwards begins with sentiment, describing it as “in the pits.” The American Association of Individual Investors’ bull–bear spread, he notes, is “as bearish as 2009 and the 2022 lows, and significantly worse than the 2020 Covid crash,” even though both Bitcoin and the S&P 500 have fallen less than fifteen percent from their recent peaks.

The CNN Fear & Greed Index has registered its bleakest reading “in years,” while Capriole’s own Active Manager Sentiment gauge shows equity managers at near-record under-exposure. “Simply put, investors are panicking today,” he writes, warning that such extreme readings “typically coincide at the mid-late stage of a major price bottom.” The combination leaves what Edwards calls “blood (and fear) on the street,” echoing the Rothschild maxim he cites in full: “the time to buy is ‘when there’s blood on the streets, even if the blood is your own.’”

Technically, Bitcoin staged a sharp reversal just days ago. A breakout candle to $94,000 reclaimed the entire $91,000–$100,000 range that had capped the market since February. Edwards classifies the move as a “significant range reclaim,” adding that “for Bitcoin, such bullish range reclaims rarely see price look back.”

Unless the market delivers “a daily close under $91K,” he writes, “it’s hard to get a technical chart more bullish than this.” The breakout coincides with his firm’s machine-learning fundamentals model, the Bitcoin Macro Index, turning positive after months in neutral territory. The index blends more than seventy on-chain, macro-economic and equity-market variables; price is deliberately excluded to avoid feedback effects. Last week the model “reset to ‘fair value’ and then resumed a bullish trend,” a shift Edwards calls “a very promising fundamental data reading.”

The ‘Triple Put’

Policy developments provide the third leg of the story. On April 2—the so-called “Liberation Day”—the United States imposed sweeping global tariffs, only to halve them and add a 90-day pause once equities sold off by roughly fifteen percent, the VIX jumped above 30, and credit spreads widened.

Edwards describes the rapid reversal as the inaugural “Trump Put,” evidence that “if markets decline too much, Trump will step in, enact policy and backstop them.” One day earlier, on April 1, the Federal Reserve began slashing the pace of quantitative tightening by 95% (the “Fed Put”), effectively ending a four-year balance-sheet contraction; derivatives traders on the CME FedWatch tool now assign the base-case to three rate cuts before year-end.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that the swoon in Treasuries was driven by deleveraging rather than foreign selling and that the department “had tools to mitigate the situation, including scaling up buybacks if necessary” (“Treasury Put”).

Edwards concludes that “we now have three major financial market puts in place, all ready to backstop financial markets. Together the US President, Federal Reserve and US Treasury represent the Triple Put,” a volatility backstop unprecedented in its breadth.

Is BTC Undervalued?

Capriole’s own “Chart of the Week” underscores the valuation argument. The Bitcoin Energy Value—an in-house metric that prices the network using aggregate miner electricity consumption—surged above $130,000 for the first time this month.

With the spot market trading near $94,000, Bitcoin therefore sits at an “almost 40% discount to fair value,” a depth of undervaluation that Edwards calls “quite rare” in the first year after a halving and “a very welcome sight.” Historically, the energy value has acted as a gravitational pull on price; gaps of this size have narrowed in every prior cycle.

Edwards tempers the bullish picture with caveats. “Political and volatility risk remain, and new policy changes are the greatest risk to derailing markets at present,” he writes, adding that Capriole will watch for Bitcoin to defend $91,000 on a weekly close and for the Macro Index to remain in expansion.

Yet his overall tone is unmistakably optimistic: “As it sits today, the outlook for Bitcoin is very bullish with confluence across technicals, fundamentals and sentiment,” he concludes. If the week ends above current levels, Edwards “suspect[s] we will be pushing new all-time highs on Bitcoin quite soon.”

At press time, BTC traded at $93,723.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com