People always say the last two halvings caused rallies, but if you look at the timing, it's not true at all. In markets, we don't talk about "catalysts" triggering moves a year later.
In fact, shortly after the 2016 halving, price dropped by 32% over the course of a few weeks!
It would be more accurate to say Bitcoin is simply in a long term uptrend. In fact, since everyone expects upside when the halving occurs, I would expect either downside or sideways. If the crowd is heavily long, price will usually drop. Any successful trader knows the crowd is usually wrong.
I actually thought I was the only one who noticed this. In the previous years that we halved, it was the next year before we even saw a huge bull run at all and like you said, this should not even be considered a catalyst at all when it comes to the movement of the market. In fact, shortly after the 2016 halving, price dropped by 32% over the course of a few weeks!
It would be more accurate to say Bitcoin is simply in a long term uptrend. In fact, since everyone expects upside when the halving occurs, I would expect either downside or sideways. If the crowd is heavily long, price will usually drop. Any successful trader knows the crowd is usually wrong.
However, I guess for every movement in the market, both uptrend and downtrend; people will always look for one fundamental action to attach to it, even though the market is just moving on its own course based on adoption. I really do not see how halving have been the main cause for market movement and I do not see why people are attaching bullishness to it.
It's just human nature to try to rationalize every market event and price move. People don't understand markets. Because they're spontaneous and somewhat unpredictable, they assume any price move must be related to a fundamental event, and that fundamental events are what drives price. They just can't wrap their head around how "supply and demand" underlie the price, and how there are endless variables that affect supply and demand.
The one news story or fundamental event you can think of obviously doesn't tell the whole story.
If anything, the halving is probably a "sell the news" event because of the hype around it. It'll be a while before the market actually starts to feel the lowered block reward, in the sense of absorbing available mining supply.