Wyckoff Logic: Bitcoin (BTC) May Soon Return to $6,000

Bitcoin Looking Weak

When asked about the drawbacks of Bitcoin, many people cite the cryptocurrency market’s immense volatility — multiple days a year, BTC and its ilk have 10%+ days.

Case in point, the Bitcoin price tumbled off a cliff in late September, falling from the lofty price point of $10,100 to $7,700 in a week’s time. This move, as made evident by over $500 million in BitMEX long position liquidations in an hour, caught many investors were their pants down.

But Bitcoin’s price action in this scenario may not be as random as it seems. One analyst has argued that since December 2018, BTC’s chart has looked exactly as defined by the four market phases defined in Wyckoff Logic, a way of looking at markets created by prominent historical investor Richard Wyckoff: accumulation, mark up, distribution, mark down.

The logic suggests that Bitcoin is in the midst of the bearish phase of markets, the mark down. Analyst Moe Mentum’s interpretation of the Logic shows that in the coming weeks, BTC may begin another -20%+ leg lower to $6,000 or potentially even deeper.

Wyckoff Logic isn’t the only sign pointing towards a Bitcoin price drop to $6,000 or even lower.

Timothy Peterson, an analyst at Cane Island Alternative Advisors, recently argued that there is a clear “relationship between the premium investors pay for OTC shares of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) and the cryptocurrency’s Price.” Indeed, as can be seen through the investor’s post, BTC has tracked the GBTC premium per share over the course of the entire yet.

Seeing that BTC has yet to fulfill this correlation over the past few weeks, Peterson made the following harrowing conclusion about Bitcoin’s price action:

“The relationship between GBTC premium and bitcoin price has not been stable and predicable over time. However, our fundamental models also value BTC at about $6,000. It appears that institutional and long-term US investors in GBTC are expecting this price level for BTC as well.”

The Other Side of the (Bit)Coin

While Moe’s Wyckoff-based analysis is showing a bearish scenario, there is another analyst claiming that Wcykoff’s studies are implying appreciation, not depreciation.

Financial Survivalism noted last week that Bitcoin’s chart from the last week of September until now is eerily reminiscent of the textbook Wyckoff Accumulation pattern. Survivalism argued that if “this current pullback (referencing the fall from $8,350 to $8,100) creates a higher low above $8,000, then I would consider [the Wyckoff Accumulation] confirmed”.

Should this bullish pattern play out in full, Survivalism suggests that BTC will return above the key $10,000 price point in a few weeks’ time.

Original article posted on the EthereumWorldNews.com site, by Nick Chong.

Article re-posted on Markethive by Jeffrey Sloe

Bitcoin (BTC) To $90,000 in 2020 Forecasts German Bank Report

After Retaking $8,000, Bitcoin to Recover Further

Germany’s seventh-largest financial institution, Bayern LB, published a report on bitcoin predicting a price of $90,000 next year.

Basing its prediction on stock-to-flow ratios, it states that bitcoin “digital gold” is a “harder” form of commodity money than gold.

Part of a series of reports on digital megatrends, subtitled “Is bitcoin outshining gold”, the report states:

“Applied to Bitcoin, an unusually strong correlation emerges between the market value of this cryptocurrency and the ratio between existing stockpiles of Bitcoin (‘stock’) and new supply (‘flow’).”

Although the bank’s analysts are quick to say caution should be the watchword when applying this model to bitcoin, it thinks it is nevertheless a useful approach.

Bayern LB concludes that taking this practical approach yields useful insights into how bitcoin should be valued.

“It becomes clear that Bitcoin is designed as an ultra-hard type of money. Next year, it will already exhibit a similarly high degree of hardness as gold. In 2024 (when halving is set to take place again), Bitcoin’s degree of hardness will again increase massively,” the report reads.

Gold developed its “hardness” over millennia while bitcoin has achieved similar properties through “supply engineering”, namely the protocol designed by Sataoshi Nakamoto.

The yellow metal is currently priced at $1,491 having pulled back from highs at $1,537 – its highest valuation since April 2013.

Bitcoin has returned 122% year to date and gold 16%.

Gold did it the hard way but bitcoin is not ‘cheating’

The report notes how gold earned its high stock-to-flow ratio the “hard way”:

“Moreover, there have been no shortcuts for the yellow metal: a higher stockpile could only have accumulated in a shorter space of time if it had been easier to mine gold. In that case, however, gold would not have qualified as a store of value and, in turn, nobody would have held the yellow metal.”

Because of its supply engineering bitcoin will be able to emulate and even surpass gold’s stock-to-flow ratio.

Stock-to-flow of course relates to scarcity, and with bitcoin’s addition of the difficulty adjustment mechanism the inventor was able to disconnect price from flow (supply), thereby making supply deterministic.

Using regression analysis Bayern LB plots a market capitalisation that is creeping up on gold by 2020 when the next halving takes place.

On this basis a price of $90,000 is postulated for next year, which indicates that bitcoin is massively undervalued.

“If the May 2020 stock-to-flow ratio for Bitcoin is factored into the model, a vertiginous price of around USD 90,000 emerges.”

But as the author(s) conclude, even the best statistical model can fall apart, so the report comes with a big dollop of Caveat Emptor.

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Bayern LB (Bayerische Landesbank ) is one of Germany’s six state banks. It is 75% owned by the state of Bavaria and has a €220 billion balance sheet.

The full report is available here.

Original article posted on the EthereumWorldNews.com site, by Gary McFarlane.

Article re-posted on Markethive by Jeffrey Sloe

Bitcoin Price Strong at $8,300, May Be Ready to Bound Higher

Bitcoin Retakes $8,300

After a precipitous drop to $7,700 this weekend, Bitcoin (BTC) bulls have managed to reclaim some ground on Monday and Tuesday.

While the cryptocurrency market hasn’t flipped decidedly bullish yet — BTC remains below some key moving averages and support levels — analysts say that Bitcoin is momentum. In fact, it is up a few percentage points in the past day, having found some support at $8,300.

Despite not showing the qualities of a fully-fledged bullish reversal, analysts say that this recent bounce is a sign of good things to come. Whether or not this materializes in an imminent move to fresh all-time or year-to-date highs remains to be seen, however.

Upward Trend Forming, Analysts Suggest

Macro investor and gold proponent Dan Tapiero recently pointed out that the Bitcoin price chart has printed a massive bull signal. In a tweet, the institutional investor noted that the TD Sequential indicator, which is a time-based technical indicator, has drawn a buy 9 signal. Tapiero noted that the last time that this buy signal was seen was in January 2019, when the cryptocurrency traded at $3,600. What followed, of course, was a massive move to $14,000 over the course of the following months.

That’s not all. The Fisher Transform, a trend indicator, recently saw a bullish crossover on Bitcoin’s daily chart, implying that the cryptocurrency may soon be subject to some upward momentum.

And to put a cherry on top of the cryptocurrency cake, Bitcoin is currently trending to retake its 200-day moving average after a week-long hiatus. The 200-day MA is a level which many analysts claim is a sign of if an asset is in a macro bull or bear trend.

Fundamentals Back a Price Recovery

The fundamentals seem to support a price recovery as well. Speaking to The Independent in the week of last week’s price decline, eToro analyst Simon Peters remarked that with Bitcoin’s hash rate still strong, “and adoption of crypto still moving forward at pace, we could see the price rise back up to $10,000 within the space of the next month.”

BitBull Capital CEO Joe DiPasquale has echoed this, arguing that since the fundamentals of the Bitcoin network “remain strong”, a move higher — one that could potentially bring Bitcoin back to five digits — could take place in the “coming days”.

Original article posted on the EthereumWorldNews.com site, by Nick Chong.

Article re-posted on Markethive by Jeffrey Sloe

JP Morgan on What Caused Bitcoin Price Crash to $8,000

Bitcoin (BTC) hasn’t had the best week. In fact, the cryptocurrency is set to close down some 20% on the week, which is one of the asset’s worst performances since the bearish capitulation seen in November of last year.

A bit late to the party, JP Morgan recently came out with its analysis of the recent price crash, trying to explain to clients the cause behind Bitcoin’s precipitous plunge off a price cliff.

What Caused Bitcoin to Crash?

In a research note obtained by Bloomberg, JP Morgan analyst Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou and a team of strategists argued that Bakkt “probably depressed prices”, but not in the way that you may expect.

They wrote that instead of the low initial volumes, it “may be that the listing of physically settled futures contracts (that enables some holders of physical Bitcoin e.g. miners to hedge exposures) has contributed to recent price declines.”

Indeed, the launch of Bakkt’s physically-deliverable Bitcoin futures gives institutions and other larger market players another instrument through which they can play this market, potentially allowing for more complex price trends that might have been hard to obtain before.

That’s not all, however. Panigirtzoglou and the JP Morgan analysts explained that through analysis of Bitcoin futures markets, they determined that the past week saw a “mark marked capitulation” of Bitcoin long positions on BitMEX. They argue that this liquidation event “also likely contributed to the sharp falls in Bitcoin prices this week”.

JP Morgan’s analysis of the price crash is similar to others completed by other researchers, in that everyone widely believed that the launch of Bakkt and subsequent futures liquidations led to the -20% performance Bitcoin has incurred over the past week.

As reported by Ethereum World News previously, eToro’s Simon Peters said the following on the crash, echoing JP Morgan to a tee:

“Pessimism over the level of activity on Bakkt sparked this most recent sell-off. However, it was the liquidation of $600million worth of long positions on platforms like Bitmex that caused the price to dramatically slump by over a $1,000 in a 30 minute period.”

Soon to Recover

Despite the bearish price action, some analysts are expecting for Bitcoin to soon mount a recovery.

According to Josh Rager, as long as Bitcoin continues to “range between heavy support near $8,000”, the more likely it is that the cryptocurrency will see a nearly 10% bounce to $8,700.

The idea here is that as $8,000 has acted as an important historical level, it will here too. A close below it would be bearish; consistent closes above it implies that bulls have some semblance of control.

Original article posted on the EthereumWorldNews.com site, by Nick Chong.

Article re-posted on Markethive by Jeffrey Sloe

Analyst Targets 10% Upside for Bitcoin As BTC Manages to Hold $8,000

After Retaking $8,000, Bitcoin to Recover Further

Over the past 48 hours, Bitcoin (BTC) price has started to show some strength. After the brutal drawdowns that were seen early this week, which saw BTC unravel to $7,700 from $10,200 in a few days’ time, this strength has been welcomed.

According to one leading analyst, this mild recovery, which has seen BTC slowly tick higher to $8,200, may just be the start of a short-term bout of strength.

Luke Martin, a prominent cryptocurrency analyst recently featured on CNN, noted that he is “expecting upside on BTC towards $9,000” — representing a 10% gain from the current price level.

While he didn’t explain his analysis in full, he made reference to a chart he made regarding the CME’s Bitcoin futures. As seen below, Bitcoin gained an average of 11.4% one week after the expiry of the CME’s last monthly Bitcoin future. And historically, it gained just over 1% one week after the expiry of a monthly future.

What this implies is that going into the next week of trading, the week after the future’s expiry, Bitcoin has a very slight bullish bias.

Separately, analyst Financial Survivalism noted that Bitcoin’s four-hour chart recently flashed an array of positive technical signs — a bullish divergence on the RSI, a rollover in the ADX, and the SAR having broken bullish.

Back to Five Digits

While a 10% rally from current levels would obviously be welcomed by bulls, others are convinced that Bitcoin will soon return to $10,000 — the level the cryptocurrency sat it prior to the recent dramatic downturn.

Speaking to British paper The Independent, Simon Peters, analyst at eToro, opined that BTC is ready to soon retake five digits:

“Now that Bitcoin is now trading below $8,500, it could become an attractive proposition for investors who want to buy the dip. Fundamentals such as hashrate remains strong, and adoption of crypto is still moving forward at pace. With those conditions in mind, we could see the price rise back up to $10,000 within the space of the next month.”

And Joe DiPasquale, the chief executive of BitBull Capital, echoed this cheery analysis, even going as far as to tighten the timeline for recovery. The industry executive asserted to CNBC that as “Bitcoin’s fundamentals remain strong”, a “price [recovery] back towards $10,000 [can be had] in the coming days”.

Original article posted on the EthereumWorldNews.com site, by Nick Chong.

Article re-posted on Markethive by Jeffrey Sloe

300,000-Employee Giant Trials Bitcoin (BTC) Payments for Staff

Pay for Lunch at Deloitte with BTC. Wait What?

Oh, what weird times we live in.

As first spotted by The Next Web, Deloitte was reported by the Luxembourg Times to have embraced Bitcoin (BTC) in a really weird way: by announcing intentions to purchase their lunches in-office with the leading cryptocurrency. The “Big Four” (the named given to a group of four massive auditing giants) professional services behemoth, which sports some 300,000 employees in offices across the globe, is purportedly integrating such a payments system to gauge the viability of BTC, which is an asset that auditing firms have increasingly had to deal with over recent years.

The report barely went into depth on this matter. First off, which is the payment processor being used to transact payments? Secondly, will the BTC received be converted back into fiat? And lastly, are people in line going to have to wait until their transaction is finalized on the blockchain before they can get their grub?

But, the report seems to be bona fide.

The report did not mention how far this pilot extends to through Deloitte, which itself is a giant that has branches across the globes that are manned by tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of staffers. However, seeing that this is a pilot, rolling out Bitcoin cafeteria payments to support 300,000 employees may likely be tough to get right on the first try.

Big Four Goes Big On Bitcoin (& Blockchain)

Deloitte isn’t the only “Big Four” firm to have recently given Bitcoin a positive nod. Previously, PWC Luxembourg revealed in a press release that it is “stepping further into blockchain” by accepting Bitcoin payments from its clients starting on October 1st.

While it isn’t clear how much actual demand PWC’s Luxembourg division will see for this solution, it asserted that it believes in Bitcoin’s future, hence its decision to accept it as a form of payment.

They called the cryptocurrency a “symbol of a revolutionary payment model”, touching on its status as the “first peer-to-peer payment mechanism that cannot be compromised and is based on a decentralized trust model”. PWC Luxembourg also accentuated the potential of blockchain in today’s society, calling the “technology underlying cryptocurrency” a likely “medium to long-term standard in the economy”. John Parkhouse, the chief executive of the regional division, stated in a press comment that he believes blockchain technologies have the potential to allow for dramatic cost savings in business, improvement of social capital, and unlocking value “currently stuck in the economy”.

Original article posted on the EthereumWorldNews.com site, by Nick Chong.

Article re-posted on Markethive by Jeffrey Sloe

Bitcoin Price Recedes to $10,000; Analyst Expects Another 4% Drop

Bears Take Over Bitcoin Price

Sorry bulls, it seems that bears want to play now.

In the past few hours, Bitcoin has shed $400, printing large red candles on short-term price charts as bears managed to take control of the market. While Bitcoin is still up by 4% over the past week, it seems that bears have managed to kill the uptrend that brought BTC from $9,300 to $10,900.

As of the time of writing this, Bitcoin is trading at $10,100, which implies a 3% to 4% loss over the past day.

Analyst Financial Survivalism believes that the recent price unwind could result in further losses for the leading cryptocurrency. In a recent tweet, he noted that Bitcoin has just dropped below the lower bound of a low time frame symmetrical triangle, which has a measured downward move of $9,620. Since BTC has managed to close under the triangle, a strong collapse to the aforementioned level — some 5% lower than the current price — could be had in the coming day.

That’s not all. According to Bytetree, a crypto analytics firm, Bitcoin’s “fair value”, which is derived from its network effects and transaction values, is currently around $7,500, implying that the cryptocurrency’s premium is at around 35%. While there is unlikely to be a full retracement to that level, BTC always ends up interacting with its fair value in the long run. So should the lack of usage of the Bitcoin network continue, a further drawdown could be observed.

Altcoins Strong In Pullback

What’s interesting about this pullback is that while Bitcoin has shed 4%, altcoins have managed to outpace the market leader, even in a dump.

For those unaware, in all previous flash crashes seen over the past three months, Bitcoin managed to outpace its crypto ilk, often resulting in short-term BTC dominance surges.

This latest unexpected divergence could be seen as a sign that altcoins are starting a return to their former glory. And while some say that this fabled “altseason” is coming far too soon, the technicals support a recovery in the value of the cryptocurrency asset class against BTC.

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According to Bitcoin Bravado’s former lead analyst, Jack, selling altcoins at this point in time is nonsensical.

He argued that BTC dominance, which recently hit a two-year high, is poised to “fall off a cliff”, potentially to collapse back to the low-60s or mid-50s. Jack backed his point by citing the fact that the aforementioned metric is currently looking as it did prior to altcoin’s strong bounce in April of 2018.

Original article posted on the EthereumWorldNews.com site, by Nick Chong.

Article re-posted on Markethive by Jeffrey Sloe

Investors Will Wake Up to Bitcoin at $1 Trillion Market Cap: Macro Investor

What Will Draw Investors to Bitcoin?

For the most part, investors abiding by traditional investment strategies have avoided Bitcoin like the plague. Legendary investor Warren Buffett, for instance, once called the cryptocurrency “rat poison squared”, later explaining that there isn’t much inherent value in the project. Other notable players in finance and politics, including U.S. President Donald Trump, have echoed this analysis, using phrases like “thin air” and “unbacked” to get their point across.

Unlike traditional stocks and assets, Bitcoin doesn’t provide a fixed yield, a dividend, or generate cash flow. And compared to traditional and modern fiat currencies, BTC isn’t backed by the power of a government or the scarcity of an underlying asset. The foreign elements of the cryptocurrency have thus led most traditional investors to cast it aside.

However, analysts are saying that investors may begin to flock to Bitcoin — if one requirement is fulfilled that is.

In a recent tweet, Dan Tepiero, the founder of investment fund DTAP Capital and co-founder of Gold Bullion International, argued that there is one thing that will drive investors to Bitcoin: a market capitalization of over $1 trillion, which BTC is still around 400% away from.

He wrote that if you boil down the demographics of the world’s largest money managers, you get “guys over 55”, most of whom he claims “can take the ‘leap’ to believe in the investment case for BTC as an asset”. But, once the cryptocurrency reaches the $1 trillion milestone, it may awake something in investors.

For those unaware, Tapiero is a global macro investor and hard money advocate that believes Bitcoin is seriously undervalued — being a secure network that can reach anyone with an internet connection. The investor made his case for the cryptocurrency in an interview with Real Vision, a finance media outlet run by some of the world’s largest fund managers and investors:

While a $1 trillion valuation for the world’s first cryptocurrency seems quite lofty, it may not be that far away. Twitter analyst PlanB’s seminal price model for Bitcoin, the stock-to-flow (SF) ratio model, has shown that after the May 2020 block reward halving, BTC’s fair market capitalization will swell to $1 trillion. This translates to $50,000 per coin.

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Why BTC?

So, what will draw investors to Bitcoin?

Well, to be frank, the first and foremost factor in getting traditional investors to allocate capital to this space is pure FOMO. We already saw this on a relatively small scale in 2017.

But also important is the fact that the leading cryptocurrency provides benefits in traditional portfolios. Delphi Digital, a crypto research outfit, found in late-2020 that “using a simple tiered-allocation analysis,” a portfolio that is made up of 57% stocks, 40% bonds, and 3% Bitcoin yielded the highest Sharpe Ratio (a popular measure of a portfolio’s risk-return potential).

Original article posted on the EthereumWorldNews.com site, by Nick Chong.

Article re-posted on Markethive by Jeffrey Sloe

Bitcoin Bull Draper Doubles Down on $250,000 BTC Price Target

Bitcoin to Surge 20x In Four Years?

Bitcoin is still trading 40% below its all-time high of $20,000. Despite this, investors in the industry still are star-struck, looking to lofty price points that they one day believe BTC will manage to reach.

Tim Draper, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, recently doubled down on one of these lofty price predictions. Speaking to Yahoo Finance’s “YFi PM” segment, the cryptocurrency pundit, who bought his first Bitcoin over five years ago and famously participated in the government’s auction of Silk Road-sourced BTC, explained that he believes that the cryptocurrency will hit $250,000 by 2022. He added that should the 2022 timeline not work out, he’s expecting Bitcoin to achieve that price by Q1 2023 at the latest.

For some perspective, Bitcoin rallying to $250,000 from current levels would imply an approximated 2,000% increase. Four years may seem to short for such appreciation, but, remember, cryptocurrencies are a paradigm-shifting technology with an absurd amount of volatility.

In previous interviews, he reasoned that using fiat monies, which he calls “poor” (referring to their quality), are illogical, citing their controllability, lack of transparency, and subjectivity to political and social whims on the day-to-day. And as the American investor argues that most of the brightest developers, engineers, and academics are working on digital assets, Draper opines that there could be a large capital flight from fiat to crypto over time. He elaborates:

“My belief is that over some period of time, the cryptocurrencies will eclipse the fiat currencies. That would be a 1,000 times higher than what we have now.”

Not the Only $250,000 Caller

Draper isn’t the only industry insider to be eyeing a $250,000 Bitcoin. As reported by Ethereum World News previously, Trace Mayer, one of the earliest public Bitcoin investors (like 2010/2011 early) and an investor in prominent crypto exchange Kraken, explained earlier this year that he believes that BTC is soon to embark on a rally that will “blow your hair back”. In fact, the investor stated that Bitcoin could easily hit anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 in the next bull rally.

What Mayer used to back his call is the stock-to-flow ratio (SF ratio), popularized in the industry by Saifedean Ammous and Raoul Pal. Twitter statistician PlanB has since adapted the SF ratio to a price model for Bitcoin. The analyst claims that there is an exponential relationship between a rare commodity’s inflation rate (SF ratio) and its market capitalization.

His model suggests that after Bitcoin’s next block reward reduction — also known as a halvening or halving — BTC will have a fair value of a $1 trillion market capitalization, which translates to approximately $55,000 per coin. So no, maybe $250,000 isn’t inbound just yet, but by the next halving, maybe so.

Original article posted on the EthereumWorldNews.com site, by Nick Chong.

Article re-posted on Markethive by Jeffrey Sloe

Institutional Investment Advisor: Bitcoin (BTC) Will be Bought by Hedge Funds

Bitcoin Makes No Sense to Wall Street

For the most part, traditional hedge funds have avoided Bitcoin like it’s the plague. Just look to the front page of CNBC and other mainstream business news outlets, which often push articles that cite mainstream economists and legendary fund managers — like Warren Buffett and Ray Dalio — in which it is stated that the subjects don’t believe in Bitcoin in the slightest.

Other notable players in finance and politics, including incumbent U.S. President Donald Trump, have echoed this analysis, using phrases like “thin air” and “unbacked” to get their point across. You see, unlike traditional stocks and assets, Bitcoin doesn’t provide a fixed yield, a dividend, or produce cash flow. Thus, to most in the traditional investment world, it makes no sense, and thus fits into no existing investment theses or strategies.

The technology itself is also abstract. “What’s a blockchain?” Traditional fund managers likely ask whenever they see it appear on their Bloomberg Terminal.

BTC to Become Part of Hedge Funds’ Portfolios

But this may be changing. Speaking to CNBC, Don Steinbrugge, the chief executive of Agecroft Partners — a hedge fund and institutional investment consultancy firm — made it clear that BTC should (and does) make sense for traditional funds, despite their hesitancy.

He explained to the outlet that he believes that Bitcoin has had an “amazing run” and sports “fantastic technology”. It wasn’t clear which part of the Bitcoin blockchain he was referring to, but BTC, compared to traditional fiat systems, is faster, cheaper, decentralized, and more transparent. Steinbrugge went on to point out that some investors have been using BTC to hedge against inflationary risk, likely touching on the mass usage of the cryptocurrency in nations stricken with unsustainable levels of inflation, which includes Venezuela.

He went on to note that macroeconomic uncertainty and tumult is worrying him. Bitcoin, of course, is widely becoming recognized as a hedge — a gold 2.0 if you will — that has the potential to perform well in tumultuous times.

Interestingly, he did call Bitcoin “very expensive”, adding that it is hard to “value” (maybe look to PlanB’s stock-to-flow model). But, he asserted that Bitcoin is “going to be here for a long time”, adding that eventually, it will become a part of the portfolios of “a lot of hedge funds”.

This may just make sense. Delphi Digital, a cryptocurrency research firm, discovered a few months back that adding 3% of Bitcoin to a traditional portfolio actually improve its Sharpe Ratio — a financial measure used to gauge risk-return profiles. And Binance Research recently echoed this, revealing in a report that including BTC in “traditional multi-asset class portfolios provides overall better risk-return profiles.”

Original article posted on the EthereumWorldNews.com site, by Nick Chong.

Article re-posted on Markethive by Jeffrey Sloe