BITCOIN is climbing back towards the elusive US$100,000 price level again, snapping its longest losing since Donald Trump’s presidential victory triggered a record-breaking rally in the largest cryptocurrency.
Since the election, Bitcoin has risen around 40 per cent as traders anticipate a more friendly regulatory environment for crypto with a president who has said he supports the industry. The token reached an all-time high of US$98,943 on Friday (Nov 22) before turning negative the past four days. Bitcoin climbed as much as 5 per cent to US$96,616 on Wednesday. It has more than doubled this year.
“The market is in price discovery, the dip over the last couple of days looks like a healthy pullback after a 45 per cent+ move higher from pre-election lows. Likely fuelled by profit-taking,” said Jake Ostrovskis, an OTC trader at Wintermute. “Traders are looking at the US$100,000 level as very likely to break.”
Some of the earlier decline in Bitcoin this week was caused by people taking profits as the price neared the historic milestone, according to Nikolay Karpenko, a director at B2C2. That was tactical, and Bitcoin is likely to cross US$100,000 soon, he said.
“As we almost reached six digits, we were thinking that it may trigger some of them profit-taking among the institutionals, among the market participants who were buying before the election and people just want to pick their profits,” Karpenko said.
There was also some volatility in markets earlier this week after Trump announced potential additional tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada.
“Once some leverage is flushed and shorter-term buyers are done taking profits, we believe Bitcoin may find a strong base of support and could make another attempt to surpass the US$100k level (the sell wall!) in the near term,” Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital wrote in a note to clients. BLOOMBERG
