I think every year is repeated. And at the end of 2018 with new volumes will jump even higher than in 2017.
Your mindset is wrong from the beginning. Every year is different, but why do you have to wait till the end of 2018? Why not trade at this very moment and take advantage of the situation? What if we ended the year on a bad note? The market is unpredictable and we can't control the price, but we can control and make good trades. There are no signs that we are out of the woods yet and the bullish market that we all have been waiting might not happen this year.
Yeah there's no definite pattern that you can say bitcoin always follows. A lot of traders like historical narratives because it gives them a comfortable reason for price changes, but that's just confirmation bias coupled with associative bias. It's a narrative that you want to be true.
It looks like the end of 2018 will be dictated by bears, which will further lower the price of bitcoin. I would not be surprised if the BTC price will collapse to $ 3000 or even lower this autumn. Last year, the Bitcoin and the crypto-currency market growth was due to a huge influx of new investors. This year, everyone hoped for the arrival of institutional investors. However, polls showed that large business doesn't intend to invest in crypto-currencies.
This is not a valid estimate because there is always new interest in bitcoin. Just because some polls, probably conducted by an institution that wants to paint a negative appearance for bitcoin and therefore with a limited sample, says that businesses are not planning to get into it doesn't mean it's going to collapse. It doesn't need continual buyers to stop going down. It just needs people to stop selling.