Bitcoin plunged from 7385 to 6830, or 7.5%, Wednesday in reaction to a Business Insider report that Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) has decided to drop a year-ago decision to create a crypto-currency trading desk.
Apparently Goldman is "uncertain" about the regulatory environment. Hmm, really? Since when has Goldman shied away from forging a new path while it influences the architecture of a new regulatory environment?
Be that as it may, let's notice on the attached chart of September bitcoin that the reaction to the report triggered a plunge that traversed the entire width of the bullish one-month price channel. But the weakness in and of itself has not (yet?) inflicted serious technical damage to the upmove from the August low at 5850 to the September high at 7415.
Key support resides from 6830 down to 6760, which must contain further weakness to avert a broken bullish pattern, with potential for a much deeper retrace of the August-September up-move. As long as 6830 to 6760 support remains intact, so does the budding uptrend in the aftermath of the December (2017) to August (2018) decline from 20,000 to 5850.
To my mind, the fact that gold (NASDAQ:UGLD) has also climbed off of a mid-August, multi-year low (in UGLD from 7.57 to 8.55 at the Aug. high) and generally has exhibited relative strength for three weeks and coincides with the underlying recovery in bitcoin is not a coincidence. Neither is the fact that both bitcoin and UGLD peaked in December-January – and both declined precipitously into mid-August.
Maybe both are bottoming now? Certainly we need to watch the action in both, especially if bitcoin can manage to hold key support (discussed above) at 6830-6760.
Bitcoin's ability to hold support could (will?) influence and support gold, which in turn will support the gold Miners (using NUGT) as it approaches critical support along its year-long lower channel support line, now in the vicinity of 11.10.
If there IS a relationship here, then it is the behavior of bitcoin that is calling the shots. Let's see if Wednesday's bitcoin debacle was a one-off exodus in reaction to the Goldman news or if the negativity and fallout have shelf-life.