In anticipation of a wave of Nazi’s infiltrating their town, these people decided to do the honourable thing and clear the surrounding area of beer, so the far-right go sober. In more wholesome news, this 93-year-old woman’s dying wish was fulfilled and she was finally arrested. And in more news of criminals experimenting with fruit and veg, this guy recently used an avocado to hold up a bank.
Oh, dear. This feels so much like 2017, when this newsletter first started on the 27th of November. The following day, bitcoin first broke $10k and reached $13k on the 6th of December — exactly eight days after. This time it only took five days. This morning, at 6h15am BST, the breaker of alts briefly touched $13k on some exchanges and reached $12.975 on BitMEX. What should we expect now that the original cryptoasset is having one of the strongest trend reversals ever?
Well, so many people are — or claim to be — now in the green. But few have taken profits, despite the nice 5% pullback seen since today’s yearly-high. That’s rational — due to the difficulty in anticipating the top before it happens, as sharedyesterday with Alex Krüger’s help. However, note that once this parabola breaks you can expect a major 30% to 40% correction. Will that be now or at $15k? Difficult to tell. But, as Willy Woo argues, this isn’t 2017 — we’re in 2011 again.
It could be interesting that even though BTC shorts are going down on Bitfinex — i.e. there are fewer people trying to bet against bitcoin’s decline on one of the largest exchange — it’s still higher than BTC longs. But if you account for traders who are hedging then there are more people betting on bitcoin’s appreciation. Could this signal it’s time to trap the late bulls before going up? Maybe not, because it seems there are still more shorts than longs at CME.
Anyway, note Bitfinex — which is operated by the same people that ran the infamous stablecoin Tether — is under scheduled maintenance since 9h45am BST. While in the past periods of maintenance at Bitfinex were followed by short squeezes, could we now see a dump to trap those longs? As usual, plan for everything. As Avi Felman shows, liquidity on Coinbase is not very high now. And its price accounts for 50% of BitMEX’s index, so manipulating the most liquid bitcoin exchange in the world is not that difficult — both to $10k and to $19k!
▪ Follow Bitfinex’s Twitter account to get updates on their ongoing maintenance. If all goes well, it should end no later than 5pm BST.
▪ Check Ready Set Crypto’s visualisation of unfilled CME gaps if you need some evidence that such an episode doesn’t justify a bitcoin dump in and of itself.
▪ Feel ColdBloodedShiller’s pain after missing tonight’s move after a tight stop loss that closed his position. Props for the trader for his transparent journal!
▪ Know that TD Ameritrade, one of the world’s biggest stock brokerage firms, has just announced its Bitcoin futures product is open for trading!
▪ See how bitcoin’s price is now returning to its mean growth line, as FilbFilb nicely shows. Still, as Trader Matt argues, it’s time to be “officially cautious”.
▪ Note DonAlt’s reminder that the mighty BNB, Binance’s own utility token, has finally broken its diagonal support. Is LEO going to own it from now onwards?
▪ Lastly, if you need a narrative to justify the current bullishness, Alex Krüger kind of jokes about BTC “trading as if a large nation were about to announce its inclusion as a reserve asset”. If that would happen, you can start thinking of Mars.
“When I hear people talking about a bitcoin “correction” I’m thinking $100k, maybe $1m. That’s what’s correct.”
