The 2025 Bull Run Didn't Come (Yet). Here's What I Got Wrong.

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In October 2025 I sat down and recorded a video picking five cryptocurrencies I thought would run in the 2025 cycle. It is now April 2026. That bull run didn't come the way I called it, and a lot of people have every right to be frustrated. Including with me.

This is the honest version of that conversation. Not a victory lap. Not a retraction pretending I never said anything. A teacher's version of a mistake: here is what I called, here is what actually happened, and what I'd do differently now.

If you came here for hype, this isn't that post.

What I called in October 2025

The video was titled Best 5 Cryptos for the Coming Bull Run (2025). My setup was straightforward. The Fed was expected to cut rates on October 29, 2025. Trump was in Asia, already through Malaysia and Japan, on his way to meet Xi Jinping. The US government was in a shutdown, and the Clarity Act had been pushed back because of it. My read: once the shutdown ended and regulatory clarity landed, the last quarter of 2025 would light up. I said, on camera, "get in."

The five picks were XRP, XLM, Shiba Inu, CREPE, and XPIN. WIKI came in as a bonus token at the end. If a couple of those tickers sound unfamiliar, that's because three of them (CREPE, XPIN, and WIKI) were microcap speculative plays at the time. I'll come back to how I'd teach that list differently today.

So what happened?

The macro post-mortem

Three things, in short.

The Fed did cut rates that week, but the path after it has been more cautious than the dovish camp wanted. The March 2026 dot plot came out with a visibly divided committee. Goldman Sachs' base case now puts the terminal rate at 3.00 to 3.25 percent, with a pause in January and cuts in March and June. The next policy decision lands April 28 and 29. The market never got the liquidity firehose that a lot of October commentary was priced for.

Regulatory clarity was the second miss. The CLARITY Act has not passed as of this writing. It is still in the Senate, with committee markup in mid-March 2026 and full Senate action expected through April and May. In plain English: pending but time-sensitive, not stalled yet. That clean regulatory green light I painted as a Q4 2025 catalyst did not arrive in the window I named.

Trump's Asia trip played out without the signed deal a lot of traders were hoping for. Reuters and other outlets described framework-level progress with China and headline-grabbing peace-and-trade announcements, but no finalized, ratified bilateral trade agreement came out of that trip. Framework is not the same thing as law. The catalyst the market was pricing did not arrive.

Stack those together and you get what my picks actually did through mid-April 2026. XRP is trading in the $1.30 to $1.38 range, roughly half of where it sat when I recorded. XLM has drifted to about $0.15. My meme pick, Shiba Inu, has sat in a descending channel since September 2025. The small-caps took the worst of it. Not a collapse on the quality names. But not the run I described either.

I want to be clear about one thing. I am not here to tell you I was secretly right and everybody else was wrong. If your priors are "told you so," this isn't the post that fits them.

The coin-by-coin scoreboard

Here is where each of the picks sits as of mid-April 2026. Pull a fresh chart before you act on any of this. I'm writing the frame, not the ticker.

XRP. The strongest of the six on relative terms, but relative is not the same as green. The current range is $1.30 to $1.38, roughly half of where XRP sat when I recorded in October 2025. The ISO 20022 banking-rails thesis is slower than its loudest promoters want, but it is still the right story. If you held through the drawdown and your position was sized properly, you are bruised but still in the game.

XLM. Similar story to XRP, with thinner volume and a smaller ecosystem. Around $0.15 through March, with some technical recovery targets in the $0.18 to $0.25 range if momentum improves. Below $1 when I called it. Still well below $1 as I'm writing this.

Shiba Inu. The meme-coin thesis did not play out the way I described. SHIB is near $0.0000060 in early April 2026 and has been in a long descending channel since September 2025. This cycle did not deliver the meme-coin euphoria I was expecting. SHIB traded. The parabolic move I hinted at never arrived.

CREPE, XPIN, and WIKI. These are the ones where I owe readers the most honesty. They were speculative picks, flagged at the time as small-cap and higher-risk. Small-caps need a full bull run to work. Without one, they bled. CREPE is around $0.0000143 in mid-April with a market cap near $8.3 million. XPIN is near $0.0014 after peaking higher in October 2025 and normalizing lower. WIKI is trading at microcap levels around $0.0000001. If you put grocery money into any of these, I am sorry. That is not the risk frame I wanted for anyone watching.

If you bought the majors and sized appropriately, you're bruised but fine. If you leaned heavily into the smaller picks, you felt this.

The three ways a teacher can be wrong

A mistake is not the same thing as a character flaw. It is also not nothing. There are three distinct ways the October video can be wrong, and I owe you which one I think this is.

Wrong on direction. That would mean crypto is finished and you should get out. I don't believe that. The structural story around real-world asset tokenization and the slow erosion of trust in fiat systems is still intact.

Wrong on magnitude. That would mean the run will come, but smaller than I described. Possible. This is close to my actual view now.

Wrong on timing. That would mean I was early. This is where I'd place most of what happened. The catalysts I named did not vanish. They slowed.

Here's what most post-mortems on crypto calls skip. Being early feels identical to being wrong when you're the one holding the bag. Your broker doesn't give you a discount for being directionally right. Your spouse doesn't accept "but the thesis is sound" at the kitchen table. I understand that. The difference between early and wrong only matters when you are deciding what to do next. And that decision is the one that counts.

The Joseph pattern, more carefully this time

At the end of the original video I reached for the Joseph story. I want to come back to it, because I don't think I used it carefully enough.

Joseph interpreted Pharaoh's dream of seven fat years followed by seven lean years. Then he gave counsel:

Notice the frame. Joseph did not predict the exact week the famine would start. He did not hand Pharaoh a price target. His counsel was simple: there is a pattern, here is the disciplined response, position the nation to survive the shift.

That is the frame I should have led the October video with, not the one I actually used. The original video leaned too hard on "get in now" and not hard enough on "this is a multi-year positioning, sized carefully, with money you can afford to wait on." Joseph didn't tell Pharaoh to mortgage the palace. He told him to store a fifth. A fifth is a discipline. All-in is gambling dressed up in spiritual language.

Scripture has another line that fits this moment better than any hype reel:

The prudent person in this passage is not the one with perfect timing. The prudent one sees the pattern and positions early, accepting that early will look foolish right up until the moment it doesn't.

I'll say it plainly. The October video was too confident about the window. The underlying read of the pattern still holds.

What this means for you

I owe you practical takeaways, not a sermon.

A quick word on what this post deliberately doesn't include. I don't publish my personal positions. That isn't a dodge. It is a policy. A teacher's job is to help you build your own framework for decisions, not to hand you a portfolio to copy. If I started posting my trades, some of you would stop thinking and start mimicking, and that is a worse outcome for your money than any specific call I could make.

If you bought based on that video and you are hurting right now, the first question isn't "should I sell?" It is: "did I size this as money I can wait on, or money I needed back by December 2025?" Those two situations require different answers. Anyone who flattens your life into a single headline is lying to you.

For readers who didn't buy and are looking at the current market as an entry, the lesson from the last six months isn't "stay out." It's "build slower than the loud voices are telling you to." Dollar-cost average into your positions. Keep speculative allocations small enough that being wrong for a year doesn't break you. Assume the catalysts you're waiting on will take longer than the commentary suggests. They usually do.

One last note for the readers who follow me mainly for the scripture angle. The lesson is the one Joseph modeled. Interpret. Position. Wait. Don't confuse a teacher's read of a pattern with a prophet's claim about a date. I've tried to be careful about that distinction for years, and the October video drifted a bit from that standard. This article is me pulling it back.

I'll keep teaching through the market and through scripture, whatever the next twelve months actually bring. I'd rather be the one writing this post than the one pretending it doesn't need to be written.