Bitcoin's Rally Past $85,000 Breaks a Curse Crypto Traders Call Rektember

The curse traders call Rektember

Since 2013, September has been bitcoin's worst month on average, losing about 3 percent and finishing positive only five times in thirteen years, according to CoinDesk's own seasonal tally. Crypto Twitter shortened that grim record into one word: Rektember, a mashup of "rekt" (internet slang for wrecked) and the calendar. August had told the opposite story, with bitcoin gaining 25 percent, its best month since November 2024. Then September arrived on schedule, a Federal Reserve rate hike loomed, and for a while the joke wrote itself. Bitcoin opened the month under $78,000 and wobbled while traders priced in roughly a 66 percent chance that the hike would actually land.

This time the curse broke. I pulled apart Monday's trading to see why, and four things stand out.

What actually pushed it there

• A short squeeze. CoinDesk tallied $647.9 million of Monday's $746.6 million in total liquidations on the short side alone, with $159.9 million wiped out in a single hour as bitcoin broke above the $82,284 high it had set on September 4.
• Falling oil. Brent crude fell for a fourth straight session, its longest losing streak in three months, easing one of the inflation pressures that had kept the Fed cautious.
• Steady ETF demand. US spot bitcoin ETFs pulled in $433 million in net inflows on the Friday before, part of a pattern of institutional buying that held up through the volatility.
• A rate hike that landed without wrecking anything. The Fed raised its benchmark rate a quarter point to a range of 3.75 to 4 percent on September 16, its first hike since 2023, and bitcoin barely flinched.

Crypto had one more scare to survive that same week. On September 15, the Senate blocked the CLARITY Act, a bill meant to settle which federal regulator polices which token, falling short 49 to 50 in a cloture vote that needed 60 votes to open debate. Bitcoin slid toward $80,000 that day. It recovered within 72 hours, which says something about how much buying interest was waiting on the sidelines.

The round trip this cycle already made

Zoom out and Monday's number looks less like a shock and more like round two. Bitcoin set its current all-time high of $126,199 on October 6, 2025, riding a wave of ETF buying and rate-cut optimism. Then the wave broke. By July 1, 2026, bitcoin had fallen to an intraday low near $57,800, according to Bloomberg's reporting at the time, a decline of more than 52 percent from the peak and its worst stretch in nearly two years. From that low, the climb back to $85,000 over eleven weeks amounts to a gain of roughly 47 percent, which makes September's drama look almost tame by comparison.

Swings like that are not unusual for bitcoin. They are close to the only thing that has ever been usual about it. The real question is whether this particular climb has more structure underneath it than the last one did, given the ETF inflows and the technical signal below, or whether it is simply another sharp reflex rally of the kind that has followed every previous crash, right up until it wasn't.

A technical signal with a decent track record

Some traders think this bounce deserves more attention than an average one, and the reason is a chart, not a headline. Bitcoin closed a week back above its 50-week moving average, a level it had not held for 45 weeks, according to research from Galaxy Digital that CoinDesk cited over the weekend. I went back through Galaxy's own numbers before trusting the headline: since 2011, bitcoin has closed a week above that average 13 separate times, and in 11 of those 13 instances the market did not go on to set a new low afterward. That is not a promise. It is a batting average, and a fairly good one.

How a coin with no company behind it gets a price

Here is the part worth understanding on the days when the number is not moving. Bitcoin has no earnings call, no chief executive, and no board setting a target price. It trades around the clock on a scattering of exchanges and derivatives markets, and its price is simply whatever buyers and sellers agree on at that moment, updated every second markets are open, which for bitcoin is always. What pushes that price in one direction for weeks at a stretch usually comes down to three forces stacked on top of each other: a fixed, publicly known supply schedule that halves roughly every four years, the pace of institutional money moving through spot ETFs, and how the rest of the financial world is pricing risk in general, which is why a Fed decision or a four-day slide in oil prices can matter as much as anything happening inside crypto itself.

We go deeper on that first force, the halving, and the surprisingly festive way the mining industry marks it, in a companion piece. A second companion piece looks at the supply cap itself: bitcoin will only ever produce 21 million coins, and several million of them are already gone for good.

Rektember was never a law of physics. It was a nickname traders gave to a pattern that held often enough to earn one, and patterns are exactly the kind of thing markets enjoy breaking the moment everyone starts trusting them completely. Whether this September gets remembered as the month bitcoin's bear market actually ended, or just the month it borrowed a good week from October, is a question the next few weeks of trading will answer better than I can today. For now, the curse took a hit it did not see coming, which might be the most bitcoin thing that has ever happened to a nickname built entirely on bad luck.