PEPE popped 4.7%. Run these three checks before you call it a bull market.

Open the PEPE chart and it finally looks like a chart again: up about 4.7% today, roughly 26% over the past month, and trading back above its 200-day moving average near $0.0000033 after a token that spent most of the last year leaking value. Too many headlines are already writing the finish line — "bulls return to the broader market." You can spend the next minute deciding whether that is true by reading, or you can spend it running the three checks that actually decide it. The exit is written before the entry, so let's lay out the screen first.

What a single green candle actually tells you

A meme token going up tells you almost nothing about whether the market regime has turned. Meme coins are the highest-beta leg of whatever move already exists, so they run first and hardest whether the tape is rotating or just bouncing off an oversold floor. PEPE has no revenue, no token economics, and no utility to anchor its price — its only valuation is sentiment with a volatility multiplier. That is not a reason to skip it; it is a reason to be exact about what would confirm the move rather than what the move already believes about itself.

So the question is narrower than "is PEPE up." It's: is capital actually leaving the majors and spreading to small caps (a rotation, worth your attention), or is this a bounce inside a tape still concentrated in Bitcoin (a bounce, worth a watchlist and nothing more)?

Check one: is the rotation metric firing?

The cleanest single number is the Altcoin Season Index, which tracks how many of the top 50 coins have beaten Bitcoin over 90 days. True alt season requires a reading of 75. Right now it sits in the low 40s — the live print is 44, and two weeks ago it was scraping the teens. The direction is improving, but the level is still roughly half of what defines a real rotation. Because it's a 90-day measure, it's a lagging indicator: it will only register a rotation weeks after one starts. Improving but not there is exactly where a trader files things under "too early to trust the label."

Check two: where is the money concentrating?

Bitcoin dominance is holding near 59% — elevated by historical standards, and a level consistent with capital still concentrating in the largest asset, not spreading out. A rotation is only confirmed when dominance breaks down while total market cap expands, which means altcoin market cap is growing faster than Bitcoin's. That hasn't happened.

Here is the genuinely interesting tension, and it's worth reading carefully: the one early signal that is firing is majors-to-majors. Ether has gained roughly a third against Bitcoin since June and pushed its ETH/BTC ratio to a seven-month high. That is money moving from Bitcoin into Ether — the first, highest-quality leg of rotation. What it is not yet is money spreading into the long tail of small caps where PEPE lives. Breadth right now is broad at the top of the market and thin below it. The rotation that would lift a frog token is a later, more crowded leg, and it has not arrived yet.

Check three: the wallet layer — what the flow says

Strip the narrative and look at the order book. On the Binance spot book, PEPE's gross capital flows have run at roughly $10–20 million a day for the past week — and the net across those days hovers at or slightly below zero, with the last two sessions printing net outflow. A token that is genuinely accumulating shows up as net inflow that stays and grows. A price that climbs while net exchange flow stays flat or negative is the signature of hot-money churn, not of a wallet stepping in to own the supply.

That is the observation. Here are the two readings, because an inflow is never a direction and an exchange shuffle is usually noise: either the leader-driven tape is pushing PEPE while real small-cap money hasn't committed yet (bearish for continuation), or price is leading and the accumulation shows up over the next sessions (neutral). The data that separates them is the same check you run tonight: does PEPE's net exchange flow turn positive and hold for three sessions running? Until it does, the flow is not confirming the pop. The wallet is the evidence; the thread is the marketing.

Tonight's screen, and when it expires

Far from decoration, here is the three-check screen you can pull up in one sitting. Score one point per working signal.

1. Altcoin Season Index approaching 75 — currently ~44, so no point yet.
2. Bitcoin dominance breaking down below roughly 58.5% while total market cap expands — currently ~59%, so no point yet.
3. PEPE net exchange flow positive for three straight sessions — last two were net outflows, so no point yet.

Score zero to one and you're holding a bounce in a Bitcoin tape: watchlist, sized for meme volatility at most, exit written before any entry. Score two or three and the rotation label starts to earn itself, and only then does position sizing become defensible.

Write the exit before the entry regardless: if you do hold, the line is a daily close back under the reclaimed 200-day average near $0.0000033, and the standing rule that the position is retired if the index or dominance conditions reverse while you're in it. A stop that sits below a level you just called meaningful is a position you haven't decided on.

And the expiry clause, because last cycle's method sold as a permanent bible is the most expensive kind of content: this screen stops meaning anything when Bitcoin dominance rises further and makes it a pure BTC tape, or when the Altcoin Season Index spikes toward 75 on a tape where everyone already watched the same article and bought the same pump — by then the rotation is crowded, funding is already bid, and the edge is gone. Re-verify the index, the dominance, and the flow before you run it again. Right now the honest box is a watchlist, not a must-run tonight: the arrow points up, but the wallet layer hasn't confirmed it yet.