With the price of bitcoin at 20-month highs, market observers are beginning to assert the digital currency’s strength could be drawing the interest of new global traders. With many market participants struggling to get returns from more traditional asset classes, investors are now being prompted to look at investments they would not have considered before, such as digital currency, they argue.
According to Tim Enneking, chairman of cryptocurrency investment fund EAM, the price rally the digital currency enjoyed just weeks earlier can be attributed, in part, to investors’ thirst for yield.
Enneking told CoinDesk: "People haven’t been making strong returns in any standard investment class for a while now. They are searching farther afield to find them." Elsewhere, Joe Lee, founder of derivatives trading platform Magnr, pointed to macroeconomic uncertainty, stating that it has led casual investors to begin exploring options outside the traditional currency and bond markets.
Against this backdrop, bitcoin prices enjoyed a sharp rally early in the week, rising from an opening price of $538.14 on 3rd June to a 20-month high of $591.03 at 09:45 UTC on 4th June, the CoinDesk USD Bitcoin Price Index ( BPI ) data reveals.
These price fluctuations took place amid highly bullish sentiment, as Whaleclub data reveals that the long-short ratio – as measured by position size – reached 88% and 87% on 3rd June and 4th June, respectively. Confidence, which refers to the percentage by which a particular day’s position sizes were larger than average, reached 69% and 61% on these two days. Bitcoin by the numbers
As in recent weeks, the bitcoin markets provided ample volatility for traders.
Hours after surging to the highest point since August 2014, bitcoin prices fell to $563.15, a price reached at 17:15 on 4th June.
The digital currency then mounted a recovery, rising to $582.83 at 02:15 […]
