The Mayer Multiple, bitcoin’s price measured against its 200-day moving average

The Mayer Multiple, from formula to reading

A division, and nothing more

The Mayer Multiple compares bitcoin’s price to its moving average over two hundred days. The result carries no unit and does not depend on the price level, so a bitcoin at thirty dollars in 2011 and a bitcoin at a hundred thousand dollars today can produce exactly the same number.

The 200-day moving average is the sum of the last two hundred closes divided by two hundred. It advances one step a day, the oldest close drops out of the calculation and the newest one enters. The bitcoin price module draws it alongside the price itself, and the multiple is simply that same distance read as a ratio rather than as an amount.

The formula, written out

The calculation divides the current price by the average of the last two hundred closes, and nothing else enters into it. The figure you get does depend on three conventions, which explain why the same day sometimes yields slightly different values from one site to another:

• an arithmetic average, never an exponential one
• days counted in universal time
• daily closes, never an intraday price

21radar applies all three, so the multiple only exists from the two-hundredth close of the series onwards. The first figure that can be calculated dates from 5 March 2011, for a series that begins on 18 August 2010.

A worked example from the October 2025 record

On 7 October 2025, bitcoin set its record at $124,777. Its 200-day average stood at $105,900 that day, putting the multiple at 1.18. The price was breaking its all-time high, and it stood only eighteen per cent above its own average.

A price record is therefore not an extreme of the multiple, and that is the first thing the indicator teaches. It does not measure height, it measures the gap to a reference that climbs along with the price.

Where the indicator came from

Trace Mayer, an early bitcoin investor

The Mayer Multiple takes its name from Trace Mayer, an American investor trained in accounting and law, and a reader of the Austrian school of economics. He publicly recommended bitcoin when its market capitalisation was still under two million dollars, invested in BitPay, Armory and Kraken, and hosted the Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast for years. In 2019 he launched Proof of Keys, held every 3 January, which urges holders to withdraw their bitcoins from exchanges on the anniversary of the genesis block.

A date nobody documents

The birth date of the indicator is established nowhere, and that is worth knowing before citing it. The pages that present it give 2015, 2016 or 2017 depending on the author, none of them points to an original publication, and no dated article or talk stands as the reference.

What is solidly attested concerns the content rather than the calendar. The multiple is indeed Trace Mayer’s, the 2.4 threshold comes from his own work, and the page The Investor’s Podcast has devoted to it since 2018 gives the most detailed historical account.

The 2.4 threshold comes from a simulation, not a theory

The 2.4 threshold comes from a backtest Trace Mayer ran on the history available to him at the time. He simulated regular purchases under various ceilings, and 2.4 emerged as the ceiling that produced the best long-run result in his data. CoinDesk summarised it that way in February 2019.

A threshold obtained by simulation is not a law, it is the best fit on one sample. This one was calibrated on a few years of trading, a single asset and a single strategy, limits this page goes on to measure.

Why two hundred days

The two hundred days did not come from bitcoin, they came from the stock market, where the 200-day moving average has served as the long-trend marker for decades. Trace Mayer borrowed an instrument equity markets already used, without altering its length.

The same number does not cover the same span, though. A stock exchange counts roughly two hundred and fifty sessions a year, so two hundred sessions reach back nine or ten months. Bitcoin trades every day of the year, weekends and holidays included, and two hundred closes reach back only six and a half months. The indicator therefore measures a noticeably shorter window than its stock-market model.

The five zones and each one’s share of history

Where the five zones begin and end

The five zones of the Mayer Multiple slice the scale from the lowest readings to the highest, and each one matches a measurable share of the past. The table gives them with their real frequency, calculated on the 5,669 closes running from 5 March 2011 to 10 September 2026, in dollars.

The neutral zone covers two days in five

The neutral zone, between 1 and 1.5, covers 41.6 % of traded history on its own. Bitcoin’s price therefore sits slightly above its average most of the time, and the median multiple confirms it, at 1.12 across the whole measured period.

That asymmetry is no accident. An asset whose price has risen over fifteen years mechanically spends more time above its average than below it, and the measurement shows it, with 61.8 % of closes above 1.

The extremes are rarer than people imagine

Above 2.4, bitcoin’s history holds only 303 days, spread across twenty-two separate episodes. Fifteen of those episodes lasted less than a week, and the longest, eighty-six days, dates back to the spring of 2011, when the price went from two to thirty dollars in a matter of months.

The bottom of the scale turns up rather more often, with 17 % of the time below 0.8, and it clusters in the long declines that follow every peak. Those periods appear among the key dates of Bitcoin, and they always last longer than the peaks do.

Why the 21radar dial is graduated by frequency

A width reads as a frequency

The dial in the module places its needle at the rank of the multiple, not at its value. The needle therefore answers a question of frequency, namely what share of past closes sits below the current multiple.

That choice comes from an observation about reading. An eye takes the width of a sector as a probability, a dial can hardly say anything else, and a wide zone passes for a frequent one.

The value scale misled the eye

The first version of the dial was graduated in multiples, on a logarithmic scale running from 0.4 to 4. It was accurate and it misled. The low zone took up nearly a third of the semicircle although it accounts for only 17 % of the past, and the zone above 2.4 looked as broad as the neutral zone, for five per cent of the time against forty-one.

On a rank scale, the width of a zone is exactly its share of the past. Geometry and figures then say the same thing, whereas the earlier version set them against each other.

The boundaries keep their values

The four boundaries on the dial, 0.8, 1, 1.5 and 2.4, keep their multiple values, written inside the arc at the exact point where their rank places them. The reader gets both quantities without either contradicting the other, the value that separates two zones and the frequency that sizes them.

A rank always runs from zero to a hundred, so the needle can no longer leave the dial. The value scale forced it against a stop whenever the multiple went past 4, which happened on ninety-one days in 2011 and 2013.

Fifteen years of measurements, cycle by cycle

The high and the low fall in the same year

The record for the Mayer Multiple is 13.56, reached on 9 June 2011, when the price stood at $31.81 against a 200-day average of $2.35. Its low, 0.236, dates from 22 November of that same year, only one hundred and sixty-six days later.

Between the two extremes the ratio is fifty-seven. No other year has come close to that amplitude, and trading in 2011 bears no resemblance to today, with a handful of venues, a few million dollars changing hands and no derivatives at all.

Peaks that flatten from one cycle to the next

Every bitcoin cycle produces a lower peak in the multiple than the one before, and the measurement leaves no ambiguity. The table takes the cycles marked out by the four halvings, with the peak and the trough of the multiple in each.

The last row covers a cycle still under way, so both its values can still move. The Bitcoin halving serves as a boundary here because it cuts history into comparable slices, not because it would explain these figures.

The troughs are rising too

The movement works both ways, and the floor of the multiple rises from cycle to cycle, from 0.24 in 2011 to 0.61 in February 2026. The gap between the peak and the trough of a single cycle has fallen from fifty-seven to under three.

That compression tracks bitcoin’s maturing. The larger the capitalisation grows, the more capital it takes to pull the price away from its average, and the moves that doubled a multiple in three weeks in 2011 no longer manage it.

Nothing above 2.4 since 14 March 2021

The multiple has not gone past 2.4 since 14 March 2021, more than five years ago. It has not even reached 1.5 since 18 December 2024, although the price set two records in between, in March 2024 and again in October 2025.

The threshold that used to flag cycle peaks has therefore stopped firing while the peaks themselves kept coming. An indicator whose main marker has been dormant for five years deserves the caveats that follow.

The limits of the Mayer Multiple

It predicts nothing

The Mayer Multiple is a measure of position, not a forecast. It says where the price stands relative to its own recent past, it says nothing about what comes next, and a low multiple is no more an opportunity than a high multiple is a warning.

The distinction matters because the literature on the indicator often blurs the two. A figure that coincided with turning points in the past keeps every right never to coincide with one again.

Its reference moves with the price it judges

The 200-day average is not a fixed point, it is computed from the very price it serves to situate. When the price rises steadily, the average climbs behind it and the multiple drifts back towards 1 without any reversal taking place.

Measurement gives the order of magnitude of that lag. Since 2016, the 200-day average on any given day matches, in level, the price of about a hundred days earlier. Its own speed depends entirely on the era, since it gained 2,473 % in 2013 and 50 % in 2025.

It ignores everything that is not the price

The multiple takes no account of traded volumes, of money moving to and from exchanges, of on-chain activity, or of leveraged positions. Two days with the same multiple can cover a quiet rise and a crash under way, since the division returns the same result in both cases.

Nor is it an on-chain indicator, contrary to several French-language sources. It reads no blockchain data at all, only a price series, which places it squarely in classic technical analysis.

Its thresholds come from a market that no longer exists

The 2.4 threshold was calibrated on the cycles from 2011 to 2017, when the multiple climbed past 3 at every peak. The last two cycles topped out at 2.82 and then 1.53, so the threshold now sits above the peaks recent cycles still produce.

21radar keeps the original boundaries rather than adjusting them, for two reasons. Thresholds recalibrated at every cycle would no longer compare from one year to the next, and the percentile dial already supplies the relative reading a fixed boundary lacks.

The multiple alongside neighbouring indicators

They all compare a quantity to a reference

The Mayer Multiple belongs to a family of indicators built on the same principle, a present quantity divided by a reference drawn from the past. Their difference lies in the denominator, and it changes the question entirely.

The denominator decides everything

The Mayer Multiple makes do with the price alone, hence its simplicity and its weakness. The other three fetch their reference elsewhere, in what holders paid for their coins for MVRV, in mining economics for the Puell, in a second moving-average setting for the Pi Cycle.

None of these indicators corrects another’s flaws, and stacking them does not produce a safer reading. They answer different questions, and the Mayer Multiple answers the narrowest of them.

In dollars or in euros, the multiple barely changes

The multiple computed in euros and the same one computed in dollars differ by just 0.022 at the median across all measured history. Since 2015 their largest gap reaches 0.14, at a time when the multiple itself moves between 0.48 and 2.82.

The reason lies in the relative speeds. The euro-dollar exchange rate moves a few per cent over two hundred days, where bitcoin moves tens of per cent, so the display currency all but vanishes in the division. The module offers both, and the selector in the top bar switches the whole Bitcoin dashboard.

Frequently asked questions about the Mayer Multiple