March 10, 2018 – Market Cycles and The Big Picture

I’ve been learning about market cycles from various sources. It is very important to try to identify what cycle we are in, for your own sanity, and as to think about what might happen or what to expect. That is not to say these projections will happen, but the more situations you are aware of, the smarter you can be about deciding what you want to do. A bubble is not a negative word. Bubbles happen all the time, and in a bull market, those can be considered bubbles. The key is not to get caught buying in at the top, and ideally, we will all be selling at the top when the big one happens. From late last year until late January, that was a burst of the bubble for many newcomers, myself included. You have people buying in who are buying in for the sake of hoping the price will go up and making money.

This is a very interesting picture that spans a decade form 2012 until 2022:

 

For the purposes of this blog post in terms of visual representation, Cryptotrendy shows market cycles quite well in these two tweets. The first one shows price action in 2014, and the second is relating the cycles to current price action today:

1) https://twitter.com/CryptoTrendy/status/972359666780069889

2) https://twitter.com/CryptoTrendy/status/972359670873640961

 

This coincides with the sentiment that the bubble not only has not burst yet, it is only getting started:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/cftc-ex-chair-crypto-bubble-wont-burst-without-set-regulations-to-bring-in-big-money

 

Why? Another point of reference is index funds for cryptoassets, which have only just started coming out. They will draw in another pool of investors who want to get in on the action without having to manage buying and storing the actual cryptoassets themselves:

https://blog.coinbase.com/announcing-coinbase-index-fund-3925fbf548db

 

When institutional money really buys in, that’s when things will really get interesting. Wall Street has only been dabbling with futures. Some institutional investors and hedge funds have started, as OTC transactions are happening. So we are still at the cusp. I think a short term correction to 3-6K, if it happens, will just be wave 2 (down) in the Elliott wave, setting us up for a monstrous wave 3 (up).

Now in terms of tech adoption and my previous post as to a bubble, that is not invalidated. Tech adoption is becoming faster and faster. Look at this picture (from https://hbr.org/2013/11/the-pace-of-technology-adoption-is-speeding-up):

One way to look at it, is that if we get another BTC correction to 3K-6K, that is the potential chasm (or at least one of them). Which sets us up for another massive run, and the tiny crypto market cap of 300 billion to day will break into the trillions. So let’s continue to see what happens.

 

What I am personally going to be doing is seeing if the next 0.6118 Fib level holds, which will be around $8200.

 

3/11 Edit: The BTC dumps occured at 8am Pacific for the past four days, 3/7, 3/8, 3/9, and 3/10… but not today. Was $8800 the temporary bottom? Guess we will see. While there is news about the Mt Gox trustee, being the reason for price drop in the last week, the trustee only held 0.2% of the total circulating supply. However order books are thin, so there could be some truth to the statement. I think the more important thing to think about is market sentiment. If the majority believes that all negative price action was due to one whale, then the bulls will have a good chance of taking hold.