Bitcoin prices experienced some notable price fluctuations in July, pushing higher as anticipation surrounding the halving drove bullish sentiment. In spite of ups and downs over the 30-day period, bitcoin volatility fell significantly in July. By the end of July, 30-day realized volatility had declined to 27%, compared to 30% at the end of June. Arthur Hayes, CEO of leveraged trading platform BitMEX , said that the decline in this key metric likely had both positive and negative effects on the market. Hayes told CoinDesk: "When volatility falls, so does trader interest and that takes the price down with it." Indeed, July’s most high-profile news story was ultimately a non-event . The halving saw a reduction of the network’s miner reward from 25 BTC to 12.5 BTC. This event took place on Saturday, 9th July, when the 420,000th block was mined. Strong market sentiment Still, that wasn’t to say there weren’t notable developments in the market’s fundamentals. In July, market sentiment was stronger on average than in any other month in 2016, according to figures provided by bitcoin trading platform WhaleClub . During the month, 81% of total position volume was long. This figure nearly doubled January’s figure of 43% and far surpassed February’s 55% total. The Yellow Line depicts Market Sentiment, as measured by the total percentage of positions that are long. The Black Line portrays Market Confidence, the percentage by which a particular day’s position sizes were larger than average. Past that, it was notably higher than the 62% that sentiment averaged during the first seven months of 2016. The trader optimism that existed in July was also illustrated by WhaleClub confidence data, which measures the percentage by which a particular day’s position sizes were larger than average. Confidence averaged 82% during July, higher than any other […]
