Bitcoin has been faring positively over the past few days, growing from a low in the mid-$3000 range up to almost $4,300 today. The positive growth is likely due to low prices driving increased buying interest from new retail investors, but many believe we aren’t out of the worst of it yet.
With the Bitcoin CME Futures contracts expiring tomorrow (November 30th), there is no doubt fresh volatility will be introduced to the market, with a downward trend highly likely. Bulls have seen this recent recovery as a sign of a turnaround, but the bears have not been scared off yet. The BTCUSDShorts chart on TradingView is up more than 6 percent, indicating a lack of confidence that an impending rally is imminent.
A recent blog post from the co-founder of Union Square Ventures outlines the nature of a bear market, drawing revealing comparisons to Amazons rise to fame during the late ’90s and early 2000’s. At the time, the tech giants stock value declined over two years from $90/share to as a low as $6/share. While it took almost six years for Amazon to recover those losses, today its value eclipses such insignificant amounts.
Further Mitigating Factors
Other than the CME Futures contracts expiring tomorrow, the day also indicates the third iteration of a repeated five day selling period that has been occurring lately. Over the past two weeks, the cryptocurrency market has experienced a sudden drop every five days since the first one on the 15th of November. If the trend continues, another one should occur tomorrow. Whether or not this is purely coincidental or the result of a whale selling off chunks of assets in a staggered fashion so as to not severely disrupt markets, is unclear.
The upcoming Nasdaq/VanEck partnership planned to launch a Bitcoin Futures product in mid-January next year is another factor that may have given a brief injection of life to the market, but whether it’s enough to sustain it through Christmas remains to be seen.
After a day that began with positive growth across the board, the majority of digital assets are now back in the red. Ripple (XRP), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), EOS, Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin SV are all trading down with losses between 2 to 7%. Bitcoin (BTC) and Cardano (ADA) are enjoying small gains of 2% while Stellar (XLM) is faring best, currently up by almost 5%.
