Yesterday, we had one of the first truly warm days so far this year in Delaware. Temperatures pushed toward 80 degrees F.
I decided to go back to the serenity deck that we installed next to the stream that runs through our backyard.
And when I got there, the sight of what was on the ground took my breath away.
I saw a beautiful spring color palette that I can't normally see through my backyard fence:
The forest floor had become a sea of deep green foliage and bright yellow flowers. I had always called these little bursts of color "buttercups" when I was growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I wondered what they're really called...
So, I pulled up the Google Lens app on my smartphone and, voila! Within mere seconds I had a photo and description of the plant adorning the forested floor: scientific name - Ficaria verna, also known as the fig buttercup, or lesser celandine. Here's a closer look:
The Google Lens app identified the plant incredibly quickly. I looked online and found a Google blogpost that said the app can now identify over a billion things. Pretty mind-blowing. I decided that I'd never want to play a game of 20 Questions with the app.
That parlor game of 20 Questions started in the U.S. back in the late 19th century as a game of deductive reasoning. It became a radio show in the 1940s and a similar version called "Animal, Vegetable or Mineral" was one of the earliest game shows on TV in 1952.
These types of guessing games have occupied children (and adult) minds for well over a century. The earliest questions in such games break things down into the broadest categories, like animals, vegetables, and minerals. It's natural for us to classify items into distinct categories. This is a shortcut that helps our brains think of the vast amount of "stuff" on the planet in a more manageable way.
We also do this in the trading and investing world. We tend to classify everything we trade into broad asset classes. Here's a quick look at some of those asset classes:
- Equities provide a means to sell equity or ownership of individual companies, plus ownership of baskets of equities like mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that trade on stock exchanges. Add in options on stocks and preferred shares that are hybrids between equities and bonds.
- Bonds and fixed-income assets are debt instruments or ways for companies and governments to borrow funds in exchange for a dividend or some sort of yield payment.
- Cash and cash equivalents are stores of value like currencies (dollars, British pounds, etc.), and instruments like certificates of deposit (CDs).
- Real estate
- Commodities and futures contracts
- Collectibles like art or those NASCAR plates you've been hanging onto
- Hedge funds, venture capital funds, etc.
And today we're going to start a series on what I believe is becoming an asset class all to itself: Cryptocurrencies.
I'll make the case that cryptocurrencies are a new and distinct asset class in an upcoming article.
Stunning: New Innovation Will Be Like “Adding Twin Turbos to the Bitcoin Engine” – and Could Send Its Price to $100,000. Learn More…
But today I wanted to talk quickly about why cryptocurrencies (in general) and Bitcoin (in particular) are back in the limelight.
Last week, Bitcoin broke to new multi-month highs after struggling in a fairly narrow range of multi-year lows. The big move has been in the financial news a bit, and has re-kindled interest in this asset class that is "neither fish nor fowl" (meaning it doesn't fit neatly into the traditional asset classes). Here's a chart that shows the move:
The red circle no. 1 at the far left of the chart shows the price of Bitcoin breaking below the black line that represents the 50-day simple moving average (MA). The remaining no. 1 red circles show the times that the 50-day MA acted as overhead resistance - a full five times over the next five months.
The first red no. 2 circle shows when price finally broke through the 50-day MA and turned that line into support that held price for the next six weeks.
The red no. 3 circle shows the big thrust on April 2 where price finally broke through the down-sloping 200-day MA.
The two big questions on traders' and investors' minds:
- Why did Bitcoin move up so strongly?
- Can it keep going?
Here are the most likely drivers of the Bitcoin price surge that has been underway for the last six or seven days:
- [mmpazkzone name="in-story" network="9794" site="307044" id="137008" type="4"]
- Breaking the key technical levels in the chart above (especially the 200-day MA) emboldened traders and vindicated the Bitcoin bulls, bringing renewed buying into the market.
- The Bitcoin "mining reward halving" pattern: In May 2020 the payment that the sophisticated Bitcoin mining operations receive in return for doing the computing that keeps Bitcoin transactions secure cuts in half. This is a scheduled event in the Bitcoin infrastructure and has happened twice before (in 2012 and 2016). About a year before each of these halving events, the Bitcoin price bottomed and then surged. Traders anticipate similar action here as the chart below from Coindesk.com shows:
- The biggest reason (in my opinion) for the price surge were large block purchases over a period of days that signaled institutional buyers coming into the market. Reuters reported that an algorithmic order of $100 million was spread across U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase, Kraken, and Luxembourg's Bitstamp in a synchronized purchase of 7,000 bitcoins per exchange in an hour, totaling over 20,000 bitcoins. This higher volume both drove prices up and gave traders encouragement that there was institutional-sized money in play.
Can It Move Higher?
That gives us some idea of why prices moved higher. Since the move up, the price of Bitcoin has stabilized at the higher levels and above the 200-day MA - positive signs to be sure.
There is both technical momentum and a sense of money moving into risk assets that support higher prices for cryptocurrencies.
In future articles, we'll look at the possibility that cryptocurrencies are their own unique asset class and dig into the specifics driving crypto prices in the medium and long term. Until then...
See Why Bitcoin Is Far from Dead (and How It Could Make You a Millionaire)
At our recent Bitcoin 20X Summit, we uncovered information that left many folks stunned – and re-evaluating everything they thought they knew about the crypto market.
You see, while Wall Street and Fortune 500 companies continue to badmouth Bitcoin, they’re diving headfirst into this craze… and I’d bet not one in 10,000 people know the reason behind it.
Go here to see why Bitcoin’s not dead… and how it could make you millions.
The post The Reasons for the Resurgence of Bitcoin appeared first on 10 Minute Millionaire.
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About the Author
D.R. Barton, Jr., Technical Trading Specialist for Money Map Press, is a world-renowned authority on technical trading with 25 years of experience. He spent the first part of his career as a chemical engineer with DuPont. During this time, he researched and developed the trading secrets that led to his first successful research service. Thanks to the wealth he was able to create for himself and his followers, D.R. retired early to pursue his passion for investing and showing fellow investors how to build toward financial freedom.