Ali Martinez Flags $73,000 as Key Bitcoin (BTC) Level Before November 3 Midterms

Martinez Flags $73,000 Into the Midterms

The Bitcoin (BTC) price is entering a historically fraught stretch of the calendar, and analyst Ali Martinez believes a slide toward $73,000 is possible if the pattern of past election years repeats. In a chart study published on X on Friday, less than two weeks before the United States midterm elections on November 3, 2026, Martinez reviewed the four previous midterm cycles and identified a deep drawdown in each one: roughly 72% in 2010, 65% in 2014, 52% in 2018 and 27% in 2022. Midterms renew the entire House of Representatives and about a third of the Senate every four years, and they can reshape expectations for economic and digital-asset policy by shifting the balance of power in Congress. Martinez does not claim the vote itself caused the past losses; he treats the recurring drawdowns as a risk investors should weigh for the closing months of 2026, with monetary policy, institutional demand and market liquidity named as the forces that will decide the year alongside the election. The level he watches sits near $73,000, which he ties to the average cost basis of short-term holders, an on-chain measure of what recent buyers paid for their coins. That metric divides the market into participants in profit and participants underwater, and it matters because recent buyers tend to sell when price falls onto their own entry cost, turning that zone into a battleground. In earlier bull cycles, Martinez notes, Bitcoin (BTC) found support around the short-term holder cost basis once severe corrections had absorbed that selling. His condition is explicit: he will look for signs that selling pressure is exhausted before treating a decline to $73,000 as a bottom, because price touching a level by itself is not a buy signal.

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Four Midterm Cycles, One Uneven Record

The quarterly record behind the warning is messier than the headline drawdowns suggest. Bitcoin finished the final quarter of three of the last four midterm years in the red: down about 16.70% in 2014, 42.16% in 2018 and 14.75% in 2022, while 2010 broke the pattern with a gain of roughly 391%. Each loss had drivers of its own: 2018 sat inside a broad crypto bear market, 2022 carried the FTX collapse and sector-wide liquidity strain, and 2014 followed the Mt. Gox failure. The drawdown percentages in the study also come without stated start and end dates, so reading them as fixed post-election returns is unsafe; late 2010 was in fact one of the strongest stretches in the asset's history. The cost-basis map has moved as well. October data puts the short-term holder cost basis near $74,600, above the $73,000 reference, a gap that reflects measurement date and methodology as much as market structure. An October 21 report from on-chain analytics firm Glassnode frames $80,000–$81,500 as the key near-term support band, places the active investor cost basis near $77,600 below it, and marks $85,000–$87,500 as resistance, above which the bearish scenario would weaken. In practice, the $73,000 level only comes into play if the nearer bands fail first, and one outside call this week argued price may retest the bull market support band below $83,000. A separate desk model framed a $78,000 to $85,000 range into the FOMC decision. If risk appetite weakens, leveraged positions would close first and spot selling would follow, testing the $80,000 supports before any deeper move, which is why spot volume, ETF flows and on-chain cost data should be read together.

What Would Settle the Debate

The disagreement here is not about whether history rhymes; it is about which cost basis the market defends first. Glassnode's bands sit closer to spot than Martinez's $73,000, so his level only matters if buyers fail at $80,000–$81,500 and again near $77,600. Three things will decide that into and after November 3: spot turnover, ETF flows and whether crypto whale wallets and long-term HODL cohorts absorb the supply. The overlap of the four-year Bitcoin halving cycle with the election calendar may explain part of the correlation, and four observations make a thin sample to trade on. The full spread of these levels, from $73,000 to $87,500, is tracked in our Bitcoin technical analysis.