Bitcoin Rally May Slow Soon
CNBC (or its analysts anyway) suggests that Bitcoin (BTC) may soon see a pullback after a jaw-dropping six weeks, during which the asset moved from $4,200 to $8,200. In a “Futures Now” segment aired on Thursday, Anthony Grisanti of GRZ Energy suggested that Bitcoin failing to hold well above $8,000 for a serious stretch of time is not the best sign.
The analyst opined that he expects a pullback, looking to an “interesting” gap between $6,870 and $6,425, which is around the level of a few key technical levels (21-day moving average). He adds:
If we start getting some profit-taking in this market, it will fill in that gap, but that’s actually very healthy for markets going forward.
This is in reference to one of this week’s CME trading sessions, during which there was a massive gap due to the asset’s volatility. Just a day earlier, one of Grisanti’s former guests also suggested that Bitcoin was topping, noting that if he was to trade the asset, he would be short, and looked to take profits in the low-$7,000s.
Other CNBC Guests Think BTC Is Ready To Surge (Further)
Funnily enough, other CNBC guests have been decidedly bullish. Path Trading Partners chief market strategist Bob Iaccino remarked that the continued growth of the Lightning Network is a positive fundamental catalyst for Bitcoin. Iaccino claims that the growth of the scaling solution, which he describes as a system that “makes small transactions a lot easier”, will allow the cryptocurrency to eventually get on the level of Visa, which can purportedly process 65,000 transactions per second. He goes on to say:
With the implementation of the Lightning Network, which is a software add-on, you can actually get these smaller transactions off the blockchain network, making adoptability of bitcoin as a currency a lot easier.”
Iaccino isn’t alone in his optimism.
During a segment with CNBC’s “Futures Now”, Tom Lee of Fundstrat explained that crypto’s premier conference, Consensus, is another sign that Bitcoin is actually out of the woods. He explains that such an event is important, as the industry needs to be brought together in a “much more higher-quality form [than the] scams and ICOs” that were all the rage in the previous rally. This wasn’t the only sign he used to accentuate that the so-called “crypto winter” is over. Lee notes that Bitcoin holding above its 200-day moving average, a key technical level; developments on the financialization of cryptocurrency (Bakkt and ErisX to soon launch Bitcoin trading products); and long-time digital asset “hodlers” and “whales” bolstering their positions are a set of clear signs that the bear market has finally bitten the dust.
But most importantly, the researcher suggests that the fact that Bitcoin has begun to near $10,000 for the first time in over a year could just be the nail in the coffin for the bear market. He elaborates that as BTC edges closer to quintuple digits, there will be an “increasing chance that traditional, non-crypto investors, traditional financial investors, are going to start to look at crypto again.”
And during a segment of Ran NeuNer’s “CNBC Africa Crypto Trader”, Travis Kling, formerly of Wall Street, suggested that he is 95% sure that the bottom is in. He looks to the fact that “reflexivity”, a term used to describe how markets snowball, is starting to materialize in the digital asset market.
CNBC Hasn’t Been Entirely Crypto-Accurate
It is important to note that CNBC’s crypto segments have been exactly the best indications of when to buy and to sell. In fact, research compiled last year by Jacob Canfield, a popular analyst and commentator, suggested that the mainstream business news outlet’s calls on the market were actually the opposite of what happened 95% of the time. Nice.
Title Image Courtesy of Thought Catalog Via Unsplash
