Screen Shot 2016-01-19 at 15.24.45 It’s been a strange twenty-four hours in the bitcoin space. The fallout from the Mike Hearn debacle looks to have left the entire sector in a mode of uncertainty, and as bitcoiners wait to see how things play out, the bitcoin price is reflecting this uncertainty. Action over the last couple of days is reminiscent of the way other (more traditional) financial asset markets approach a macroeconomic event. Take a look at the action in the EURUSD over the last two ears for example, during the three or four days preceding a day on which markets expect the Federal Reserve in the US, or the ECB in Europe, to raise rates, or announce a pull back of quantitative easing programs. Similarly, and on a more condensed timeframe, check out the intraday action in the forex markets on any USD pair on the Thursday that precedes the first Friday of every month – non farm payroll day. Essentially we see a consolidation of bears and bulls, and a real tight range within which price is contained. Technical charting theory attributes this to a couple of things. First, that through the nature of uncertainty, there is a similar number of short and long positions in the market. Second, the rest of the market doesn’t want to take a position before a breakout that indicates a resolution of the deadlock.
As we head into Tuesday’s European close (we’re about one hour short of it at the moment), we fall into the latter category of this attribution. Our breakout strategy affords us the luxury of setting up our positions against exactly this sort of action, with the goal of profiting from action in either direction. We don’t need to form a bias, which is lucky because fundamentally bitcoin is […]
