First Mover: As Bitcoin Shoots Past $18K, There's Comfort in the Crowded Trade

ALSO: CME's Bitcoin Futures Are More Popular Than Ever

November 18, 2020 Everything you need to make sense of the crypto markets and beyond Sponsored By: By the CoinDesk Markets Team Edited by Bradley Keoun If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here.  Bitcoin (BTC) +4.1% $17,855 Ether (ETH)  +0.88% $474 (Price data as of Nov. 18 @13:24 UTC) TODAY: Price Point: Bitcoin surges above $18k for first since December 2017. Market Moves: "Long bitcoin" is one of the most crowded trades in financial markets, a new survey suggests. But most signs indicate that many investors are only just now getting in.  Bitcoin Watch: Bitcoin has plenty of scope to extend its current rally, according to an indicator quantifying the spread between the price and the 200-day moving average, CoinDesk's Omkar Godbole writes.  What's Hot: CME registers record bitcoin futures open interest amid heightened price volatility expectations, Grayscale's AUM rises above the $10 billion mark, Mexico's second-richest man joins the "buy bitcoin" bandwagon.  Price Point Bitcoin's ascent continues, with prices scaling the $18,000 mark during Asian trading hours. In a sign of persistent dip demand, sudden pullback to $17,200 seen following the breakout to fresh 34-month highs was quickly reversed.    "Bitcoin will now be setting its sights on the all-time high of $20,000," Simon Peters, crypto asset analyst at multi-asset investment platform eToro, said in an email. "The last time bitcoin hit the $20,000 mark was in 2017 and retail investors piled in as they experienced crypto FOMO."   In traditional markets, European shares and U.S. stock futures gained ground, and safe havens such as gold and the dollar weakened as investors continued to price in prospects of swift global recovery on potential coronavirus vaccines.  Market Moves Has betting on bitcoin become a crowded trade?    That was the assessment of some 4% of global fund managers in a monthly survey published Tuesday by Bank of America, when asked to name the "most crowded trade." The response "long bitcoin" ranked behind "long U.S. tech" (65%), "short U.S. banks" (11%), "long corporate bonds" (9%) and "long gold" (5%): "Long bitcoin" is seen as the "most crowded trade" by 4% of global fund managers. (Bank of America)  A few things come to mind.    1) It's hard to argue that "long bitcoin" is particularly crowded right now, given how many big investors have yet to assert that the trade has any merit at all. On Tuesday, Ray Dalio, CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, tweeted several "problems with bitcoin being an effective currency," including its limited usability as a form of payment. "What am I missing?" Dalio wrote. (#CryptoTwitter had plenty of responses for that.)   According Mati Greenspan, founder of the foreign exchange and cryptocurrency research firm Quantum Economics, price-chart patterns suggest that bitcoin was "due for a pullback a long time ago."   "But the fundamentals are firmly in control right now as increasingly large players are entering this tiny market," Greenspan wrote Tuesday.    In other words, people are just starting to arrive.    2) If the trade is crowded, then a lot of investors must be overjoyed at how well it's working out this year. Bitcoin shot past $17,000 Tuesday, and then $18,000 early Wednesday, rising to levels not seen in three years, with prices up more than 150% year-to-date. That compares with 12% for the Standard & Poor's 500 Index of large U.S. stocks. This might be a sign that the rally is overdone. But as discussed previously by First Mover, a lot of investment decisions are made on the basis of backward-looking track records. Few big banks have made a serious push into cryptocurrencies, but Germany's Deutsche Bank has described bitcoin as the world's best-performing asset in 2021.    "If you knew 10,000 people who owned bitcoin, you could phone all of them and congratulate them on their success," Matt Blom, head of sales and trading for the cryptocurrency firm Diginex, wrote Tuesday. "Thing is, you don't know 10,000 people who own Bitcoin, you probably only know a handful. And they will all say the same thing: `I don't own enough.'"   3) Market signals suggest that interest among big investors is growing, not plateauing – suggesting there's no shortage of traders looking to put more money into the trade. Open interest in bitcoin futures has climbed to above $6 billion from $4 billion as recently as October, according to the data firm Skew. Even those amounts are still tiny fractions of bitcoin's total market capitalization, currently about $325 billion.  Chart shows rising open interest in bitcoin futures (Skew)  4) The number of active bitcoin addresses recently climbed to about 1.2 million, but that's still a touch below levels witnessed during bitcoin's bull run of 2017, when prices surged to an all-time high near $20,000. According to the Norwegian cryptocurrency analysis firm Arcane Research, "the number of active addresses has grown more organically in 2020, without a surging and dramatic spike as witnessed in late 2017."   "The increase in active addresses indicate that bitcoin is seeing increased usage and adoption," Arcane wrote Tuesday in a report. "This is a bullish and healthy sign and underlines the strength of the current bull run."   Chart showing number of active addresses climbing back toward 2017 high. (Glassnode/Arcane Research)   5) The reality is that nobody really knows how to value bitcoin. It's an 11-year-old cryptocurrency, too short of a timeline to really evaluate what it might be worth in the future, especially when neither Federal Reserve nor private economists can agree on the likelihood of eventual runaway inflation from this year's trillions of dollars of coronavirus-related stimulus, or on the impact of epochal changes like the shift to remote working. Bitcoin has no earnings, so it can't be valued like a stock, and it has no yield, so it can't be valued like a bond. The value is really just a function of how many people want to buy it, versus the amount that's created every day by cryptocurrency miners. (By the way it's about 900 bitcoin per day, worth about $15.3 million at current prices.) Dalio argues that governments will "outlaw it and make it too dangerous to use." But according to that same Bank of America fund-manager survey, some 3-4% of global fund managers think bitcoin is the asset class most likely to outperform in 2021. (Emerging markets ranked first, followed by the S&P 500, oil and gold.)     That means roughly the same percentage of respondents see bitcoin prices climbing higher than those who see the trade as overcrowded. These are all just guesses about what the future holds, of course. A Citigroup analyst recently predicted the price could pass $300,000 by the end of next year.    If that's the case, there's little reason for the crowd to disperse.  - Bradley Keoun Chart showing a percentage of global fund managers projecting that bitcoin will outperform next year. (Bank of America)  SPONSORED BY NBA TOP SHOT NBA Top Shot is taking blockchain to the next level.   The first of its kind, NBA Top Shot is a platform where fans can collect Moments -- jaw-dropping highlights from the NBA's best -- fully-licensed and developed in collaboration with the NBA and NBPA.   Each collectible offers a snapshot-in-time for your favorite teams and players, like a trading card for the 21st century. Every Moment has a unique edition number and circulating count, verifying its rarity.   Being on blockchain allows these Moments to be truly owned by collectors, and means that they can do more than physical trading cards. NBA Top Shot is launching a mobile game in which collectibles are essential to winning quick-play matches.   NBA Top Shot is now in Open Beta, so anyone can join. Check it out and join the Discord channel to see their vibrant community.   Want to learn more? Reach out to caty@dapperlabs.com. Bitcoin Watch Bitcoin and gold monthly chart showing relative price performance. (TradingView) Bitcoin's recent rally from $10,000 to $18,000 looks similar to the steep rise to record highs near $20,000 seen in the final quarter of 2017. However, that does not necessarily mean the market is now nearing a top.    While the 2017 rally peaked in December, the current rally looks to have legs, according to the Mayer multiple, which is the the ratio of price to the 200-day moving average. At press time, the ratio stands at a 16-month high of 1.67. However, the metric is still well short of the 2.4 threshold that has historically signaled the final leg of the bull markets.   The ratio rose above 2.4 on Dec. 1, 2017, after which bitcoin doubled in value to $20,000 in just two weeks before falling back to $12,000 on Dec. 22. Similar price action was observed in April and November 2013 after the ratio rose above 2.4.  - Omkar Godbole   Read More: Bitcoin Indicator Suggests Bull Market Is Still in Early Phase What's Hot CME sees record high open interest for bitcoin futures on wave of institutional inflows (CoinDesk)    Grayscale (a unit of CoinDesk parent company Digital Currency Group) says assets under management broke $10B (CoinDesk)   Mexico's second-richest man reveals 10% of his liquid assets are in bitcoin (CoinDesk)    Crypto-friendly U.S. regulator Brooks gets nod from Trump to serve 5-year term leading OCC (CoinDesk)   Traders brace for major volatility as bitcoin price nears record high (CoinDesk)    Zcash undergoes first halving as major upgrade drops 'Founders Fund' (CoinDesk)  OKEx mining pool flatlines after 99.5% hash power drop as withdrawal suspensions spook clients (CoinDesk) Analogs The latest on the economy and traditional finance U.S. retail sales lose speed as pandemic, lack of fiscal stimulus weigh (Reuters)    Saudi Arabia's state oil company, Saudi Aramco, selling $8B of bonds to raise cash as low crude prices dent finances (Reuters)     Trump Fed nominee Judy Shelton (who advocated return to gold standard) fails key Senate procedural vote (CNBC)    New York tourisim industry, which supported 400,000 jobs and $46B of annual spending in local hospitality industry, won't recover until 2025 (NYT)     Roughly 300 companies that received about $500M of emergency loans from the U.S. government have filed for bankruptcy (WSJ)  My Data, My Money: Data Dividends and the Digital Economy   Few could have imagined the true costs of "data for a service," driven in large part by a monopolistic economy for users' information, as powerful internet giants and platforms have melded into our daily lives.    A movement of scholars, professionals and activists is exploring alternative ways to remedy the power imbalance of data via a data dividend – a mechanism whereby companies share profits derived from the use of personal data directly with users.    Is the data dividend an opportunity to restructure the digital economy on more equitable terms, or merely a redesign of the current data ecosystem?   In "My Data, My Money: Data Dividends and the Digital Economy" on Nov. 18, CoinDesk privacy reporter Ben Powers invites leaders from The Data Dividend Project, The Data Union and HACKYLAWYER to explore the alternative ways to remedy the imbalance in power through a data dividend or by other avenues.   Watch CoinDesk TV live on Twitter, YouTube or CoinDesk.com. Learn more.   Tweet of the Day Webinar: How to Value Ethereum   The penultimate episode of How to Value Ethereum explores the metric of gas costs. How is gas calculated? What is its unit of account? And why is it an important metric to valuing Ethereum? Find out the answers to these questions by registering for How to Value Ethereum, episode 3, on Nov. 24. Goodbye, DAI and bitcoin SV. Hello, kyber and cosmos.   A swelling in volume in the crypto markets over the third quarter has changed the list of noteworthy digital assets beyond bitcoin and ether that matter most to traders and investors. That change is reflected in the CoinDesk 20.    In the latest revision, five assets were replaced by crypto assets that saw volume surges outpacing even the double-digit gains posted in market volume as a whole.    The new assets are algorand (ALGO), cosmos (ATOM), cardano (ADA), kyber (KNC) and omisego (OMG). On average, incumbent CoinDesk 20 asset volume increased by 22% from Q2 to Q3. However, these crypto assets' trusted market volume increased by much more.   These five new crypto assets replaced incumbent assets that are well-known to crypto investors. Read more about how they displaced incumbents bitcoin sv, dai, zcash, monero and dash on CoinDesk 20's latest update. Disclaimer: The information presented in this message is intended as a news item that provides a brief summary of various events and developments that affect, or that might in the future affect, the value of one or more of the cryptocurrencies described above. The information contained in this message, and any information liked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. The information presented herein is accurate only as of its date, and it was not prepared by a research analyst or other investment professional. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency before deciding to purchase or sell any such instruments.  ATTENTION: Scammers have been sending fraudulent emails with links to sites disguised to look like coindesk.com. If you are in doubt about a link, type https://www.coindesk.com directly into your browser; do not copy and paste. Remember, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. First Mover   A newsletter from CoinDesk   See Previous Editions Copyright © 2020 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.    250 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10003, USA You can manage your preferences here or unsubscribe from all CoinDesk email.