Just over a week ago, I did a post called One Hundred Thousand in which I woefully recounted my crypto journey from a starting point of $80,000 up to $89,000, down to $79,000, up to $99,000, and then down to $91,000 again.
Well, it’s worse. And I’d like to talk about that, and I’d like to share why I have—once again!!—decided to step aside for the moment from crypto-land. Let’s start with this chart of Ethereum in recent days (I am typing this on late Friday night).
In a word, it sucks. I look at a lot of charts, and the number of charts which appear has become vanishingly small. It doesn’t help that the act of getting jerked around has become more and more common. One extreme example was just a few days ago, with Litecoin, which was one of my holdings at the time. Look at this whiplash-inducing mayhem, all in the course of minutes…
If you look over a longer period, this spike sticks out like a grotesque data error, but it did, in fact, actually happen.
And it isn’t just insanity like the Litecoin - Walmart (NYSE:WMT) hysteria. Another example, Curve, was one of the few coins I genuinely still liked a few days ago. Since that time, its nice price action has—as is the case with so, so many coins—simply withered away.
There is one reason, far above everything else, that I’ve decided to step aside for the foreseeable future: my observation is that the entire crypto space is being led around by the nose by the equity markets.
I have several live chart monitors in my own office, and the /RTY and /ETH are next to one another (that is, the small cap futures and the Ethereum futures). I’ve got to tell you, I might as well just turn one monitor off, because they are practically one and the same. At times, it seems they are following each other tick by tick. Listen, if I wanted to trade small cap futures, I’d trade small cap futures. I didn’t ask for this.
I think there’s actually a good reason that assets are joined at the hip: it’s because the animal spirits, and the trillions of dollars in fiat, which have compelled prices so high have affected everything. I mean, just look at last February and March, when the equity market oh-so-briefly went into a tailspin. What did crypto do? Have a mind of its own? Not at all. It fell right alongside, and very dramatically, pummeling Bitcoin down to the $3,100 area. about 95% below where it got this year.
So it really boils down to two closely-related reasons that I am simply uncomfortable remaining invested:
- My observation is that the equity market’s psychology is driving crypto, and frankly, I’d rather trade an independent market;
- My observation of the stock market, particularly given the seasonal weakness of equities, gives me confidence that stocks are vulnerable and, thus, so is crypto.
Now, I felt crypto was lacking a base when I did my post a week ago, but I still dabbled around with some positions. Most were profitable—some nicely so—but, on the whole, I would have been better off doing absolutely nothing and staying out altogether. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and transfer $30k out of my account and shove it back into my boring old checking account, just because I’m not even using my capital anyway. My zeal got the best of me.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve still got a respectable profit, and I still have every intention of getting back in with both feet. But I would feel much better doing so if it was clear to me that crypto was acting with a mind of its own and, even better yet, if crypto was dragged down kicking and screaming during a nice, hearty drop in equity prices. I’d love to pick up some bargains, were such an event to transpire.
As it is now, though, I look at the longer-term Ethereum chart, and it does not scream “bullish base” to me. Instead, it screams uncertainty. On top of this, those horizontal lines I’ve drawn are vitally-important levels of price support. The lower one in particular, if broken, would portend much lower prices, I believe.
Hope is not lost, however. Almost every chart of interest to me resembles, more or less, the Litecoin chat below. What I mean by that is it is comprised of:
- a tremendous bullish base;
- a substantial price ascent;
- a plunge in price;
- the formation of a smaller bullish base;
- range-bound action ever since, banging between support (green line) and resistance (red line)
Break the red line, and I think we’re off to the races. Break the green line, and things look very grim and very messy.
