Bitcoin Forum

What do you guys think about the low volatility last days?

I found this:


Source: https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/4706/is-speculation-leaving-the-market-what-does-low-btc-volatility-really-mean-.html

So Bloomberg is somehow bullish, I am too!

the problem is people only look at the first couple of coins in the "cryptocurrency market" and forget the fact that there are 2500 shitcoins in this market and when you want to talk about it as a whole then you should talk about all the 2500 shitcoins not just the coins on top that started being stable like bitcoin.
and speaking of all of them in the past week there has been 30 coins with the total volume of $20 million that got pumped more than 100% (1x 4000% and 4x 500%). and a total of 150 coins that had a pump bigger than 50% with a total volume of $300 million.

as you can see the market is not at all boring. it is the same as always. bitcoin is stable and undergoing an accumulation phase so day traders are mostly focusing on pump and dumping smaller shitcoins to make profit while bitcoin is stable and come back as soon as the stability was over.

Could be a phase of accumulation before we take a dramatic turn up or down. There’s usually a quiet before the storm (see previous price movements over bitcoin’s lifespan).

In 2015 $150-$250 was a similar price range we were stuck in for a long time.

that's all it is---quiet before the storm.

i'd like to think it's the same situation as 2015. and it might be. but i prefer to take things wave by wave. we've got a volatility squeeze on our hands. once we see a real breakout, it should trend for a while---whichever direction it is.

Low volatility and low volume like we're experiencing indicate the market is in a state of limbo, people are relatively balanced in their expectation for the future price of bitcoin. Very few people still holding are willing to sell and very few people are looking to accumulate more bitcoin. As other's have said it's the quiet before the storm, a major price movement will occur over the next year or so it's just a question of which way. Price charts show similar patterns before and then an uptrend but no one time is the same as the last.

The "bears" will become "bulls",because the "bear market" is tired?
This is an helluva analysis.Maybe the bear market should rest for a few months of even 1 year. ;D
No,the speculation isn't leaving the market,it's always there and it will never leave,the only difference is just the amount of speculators.

OP, low volatility is the state of the market when the whalecumulators are most active. But be careful. If the whalecumulators sees high volatility and a rally caused by the speculators, it will take only a push of a button for the whalecumulators to put the price down and release the FUD on all news outlets. 8)

Speculation is still there, just not as obvious to see for most people here as it was months ago. In case volatility decreases, traders tend to use higher leverage multipliers for their trades to have them still be worthwhile. The difference is that most of the wannabe traders can't work with low volatility and for that reason just don't trade at all, where the institutions and other sharks can continue doing what they have been doing for decades on the stock market without any problems.

Boring for crypto traders means still good enough to trade for most traditional entities being active here.

In my opinion the market is getting ready for big movement. Now everyone has their last hope, end of year increase and ETF decision. If this event will not happen and if we will enter 2019 from current price, we can fall below 6k.

things aren't that easy though :P
it will all come down to  the balance of opposing forces. it is not just one whale pushing a button like some of the centralized altcoins are. right now there is a general incentive that is to accumulate at this level and a fear in others who prefer waiting.
as soon as this market incentive changes, the balance of forces will also change and no matter what, if a whale goes against that trend he will be crushed.

Platforms as BitMEX are frustrated with how the market is lacking volatility, and I like that. It's actual use that can develop right now. Isn't it amazing that the $100 you received months ago is still roughly worth the same? That's money. :)

People don't realize how much of an accumulation opportunity they are being offered right now. Even if the price drops a bit from where it is right now, you can use that to lower your previous entry points even further.

If you believe what you invest in, don't let the market sentiment bother you too much. I remember how I last year during the bull run wish I bought more before it started to break through ATH after ATH, and that's what I'm doing now.

I don't think that speculators are leaving. They're out there waiting for the right opportunity.
It seems that people are tired with this bear market and unwilling to follow pumps because all previous ones ended in the price coming back to the same level of 6000. If you see that the market is going towards the same range you give up, capitulate, wait for it to play out. Confidence will return in time.

It is normal. Unfortunately, many people have focused on what happened in 2017 as reference values for Bitcoin fluctuations.
We have seen peaks and bottoms in the range of $ 8,000 and $ 5000; these changes are healthy for cryptocurrencies, abnormal for financial markets and what happened last year.
Perhaps the last stability within the limits of $ 6,000 caused by the lack of good news "Last year was full of positive than this year."

The reason why the volume is low is because the people who are comfortable with BTC at $6000 have stopped selling. There was alot of volume when we broke $10K because alot of people that bought at $19K or so ended up getting nervious and they closed their positions. Hence the reason why the volume was much much higher a few months ago.

Now we have been in this area for the past couple of months pretty much. We are at the point where there is a shortage of sellers pretty much. The only people selling right now are mostly miners and ICOs. However some miners even stopped selling and are just hoping it starts to turn around and they will sell maybe when we go back to the $10K area.

So from a technical analysis point of view, this might be some short term bottom, however it doesn't mean we will cross $10K or even set a new ATH anytime soon. We can go up from here and still trade sideways.

volume isn't really low though! for example on Bitstamp for the last 12 days that price has not even been moving the average daily price is about 1600BTC or nearly $10 million and i wouldn't call that "low"! and that is just one exchange. according to coinmarketcap.com the last 24 hours volume in total for bitcoin has been $3.5 billion!

all you can say is that it is not as high as when price was shooting up or falling down. which is an obvious statement because people trade more when price is changing more.

The low we are talking about both low compared to what it used to be and also exchanges are known to meddle with their own volumes to make sure they look like one of the most active places.

We in our country can check it honestly because places that changes from fiat to bitcoin here actually shows how much it was sold without a lie (I mean probably because it really gets low and gets high according to market without hesitation and it really got quite low for couple days like 1-2 bitcoin a day compared to 100+ last December) so I have a chance at looking volume like what it is, maybe not exactly but at least shows me the trend.

I have seen bitcoin volumes to go up as much as 360 btc in our country at the peak last year and than during the august and September months it was insanely low and dropped to 1-2 btc a day and mostly around 4-5 bitcoins at most. Lately it has risen back up a bit to 16 bitcoins a day on average and that tells me even though we are not back to great days, people are expecting it to go back up.

great county, so transparent, I wonder which one is it.

Great study about volume, and I share your idea about people expectation. I see a lot of interest in the streets again in my country.

keep us updated if volumen rises there!

I do not think they are leaving the market however the volume is not enough for them to manipulate the way they want to. Right now they are capable of doing it at minor scale but they used to do it a lot more and change it a lot higher and lower, with this low volume of bitcoin it is a lot harder to buy or sell at their levels without disturbing the market all together.

They are probably waiting on something just as we do so they could get back into manipulating, if something huge happens than the market will be alive again and the volume will get higher again and when the volume goes higher than the whales who manipulate the market will comeback. They are not that much different than you and I, they manipulate in a way that they try to buy low and sell high, however they sometimes make it low and make it high themselves for it, that's the only difference.

One thing is that the volume is somewhat transferred to another asset/coin that's why there haven't been any movements for bitcoin recently. A slow trading scenario doesn't necessarily mean that volatility is lost (for cryptocurrencies, of course). Do note that there are also other assets in which traders might be invested to and are tending those first since they are more profitable than bitcoin at the present moment. Even I would move my funds into other assets first if I see that they are ripe for the picking and the opportunity is present compared to keeping up with bitcoin while everyone is away.

Yes, I also think so. In many ways, the movement of the market next year will determine how Bitcoin will behave in these two last months of the year. If there is no growth in the cryptocurrency market at this time, there will be a deep disappointment with cryptocurrency users and potential investors. In this regard, the stagnation of the market may be delayed for a long time. I would not like to observe such stagnation also in the first half of 2019.

It's only boring for the investors that look at the top end on the coincarketcap rankings as they all follow bitcoin. Look at the bottom end of the top 100 and you can make a killing if you pick the right altcoin

actually none of the altcoins really follow bitcoin even the top ones. the thing is, when bitcoin falls all of them fall harder which has created this illusion that they may be following bitcoin. but if you compare charts together you can see  that there are enough exceptions to make this untrue.

as for what altcoin to choose, you don't choose a coin that has dropped. you choose a coin that is about to rise or is getting pumped. otherwise there are coins that have dropped and if you buy them you will end up buying something that either never rises or will take a very long time to have any kind of pump.

Did you mean movement for the last two months will determine how Bitcoin will behave next year? But yeah I personally don't think there will be any drastic movements until next year (and maybe midway into it, even). People keep talking about bull runs, but it currently feels like the $6k support breaking is more likely. I hope I'm wrong, but we'll see I suppose.

Either way, I'd say it's probable that speculators are just hodling, at least as far as Bitcoin is concerned. I seriously don't think they'd be leaving the market entirely just because of low stability.

The current low volatility is just temporal and it should be a good sign for the investors to begin to comeback since those are the conditions they like the most, a low price and low volatility, but the ones that should be desperate are the ones that love the volatility like the speculators since they are probably not making any money at the moment.

The market volume data gathered from exchanges is misleading as we cannot ever know what's going on behind the curtain (that's OTC trading). I wonder how volatility % would be if we knew all the trading going out outside of our reach.

I don't doubt for a second OTC volume has only been going up in the past few years. I know there were some recent news of a 144k buy which then was supposedly debunked, however this doesn't mean huge buy orders aren't happening OTC, and all of that data we cannot track so the analysis is always incomplete.

Eventually OTC will dry and whales will be forced to enter exchanges, but until then we just can guess.

speaking of speculation and price, the OTC volume does not matter at all because what happens outside of the market and out of our vision does not affect the market at all. if you sell $100 million bitcoin off the market and over the counter or if you buy that much, that still doesn't change the price 1 cent! why? because you are not buying it from the market aka exchanges where the price is determined. so the volume that exchanges report is not misleading. (it may be misleading only if they report fake volume but that is another topic).

OTC transactions may not affect the spot market price, but in general, OTC market liquidity (or lack thereof) does affect spot market prices.

It's not the volume per se, but the available liquidity. For instance, if miners can't sell coins OTC, they'll dump on exchanges. If investors can't buy coins OTC, they'll buy on exchanges. This obviously affects price. That's what cellard was talking about.

It would certainly be interesting to see data about the OTC market. It's all a mystery to us retail plebs. :)

A lower range has been apparent for months I think, its just become more obvious in the autumn then previously but a few noticed it happening for upto 6 months now.    Theres a bit of a triangle between the lowest prices and the highest seen, I already thought this had closed and we had a breakout scenario but nothing happened so it seems we wait further.

The main obvious reason is the trading of bitcoin price contracts in Chicago and hedging is down around prices based on a fixed price there

All signs seem to point to OTC volumes going up. Even if it's circumstancial evidence, the orders are getting larger, getting deeper.

We're not also looking at p2p volumes, which are definitely making a comeback especially now that there are so many alternatives to Localbitcoins.

And then, we'll truly see volume flee exchanges once second layer and off chain trading like on LN take hold.

As far as I am concerned, what is going on in the market or on exchanges is just what I see as a strategy to keep holding the price to some level so as to achieve the accumulation phase, which we all know that the amount most institutions will be purchasing to get in is not something they will basically be doing on any exchange as that could have a huge effect on it.

Basically, most exchanges put together will not even be able to hold up the volume, so in a way, I believe like you said, they will basically be accumulating the OTC way and keep acquiring as much as they can, while suppressing the price for as long as they can. The funds are there to do all this effectively and it has been their game, so they basically know how to do it well.

Speculation is always going to be a part of the market, but the thing we should be looking at is that rather than the market being extremely and totally speculative in nature, we should see it become more usable as that is what would create a balance and at least reduce the level of speculation and volatility in the market.

The fact that we are seeing low volatility now is basically because the market is trying to find the next move, and in such period, we always get to see lower volume in most cases, which right now, once we get to see a breakout, a lot of you will see that volatility has still not left the market.

we always have times like this when people seemingly give up on bitcoin and it seems like the speculation has left the market. but if you look more closely at the market you can see that the volume is still up, whether on exchanges or off exchanges.
and also you can see that there is "wise money" that is being invested in bitcoin while price is kept stable and low!

I would not see anything as boring at the moment, because what I see honestly is the market at least picking where to go, up or down and until then, we will see this sideways movement.

However, what you said, makes a lot of sense, and when the market eventually recovers, there is always the necessity to at least, try as much as possible to be picking the right coins or tokens with great potentials at the moment. However, speculation is still going to be fully part of this market until we start seeing real life usage and there is actually nothing we can do about that.

That is the thing! What happens within the exchange is what they want common man to believe and then since that is what basically determines the main price, they will most definitely be buying in large volumes over the counter as this would be their usual way.

Once they are done accumulating, that is when a lot of people will get to see that volatility is not yet out of the market and there will still be more to come. They are market makers, and they will always know how to keep making the market to favor them in the long run until they are holding huge stash of the positions as much as they can.

Bitcoin prices are getting to high for speculators to really see the huge gains they imagined before when you buy at 6k it has to gain 1 trillion dollars in market cap for you just to 10x your investment.
That does not sound very appealing to me bitcoin is high even at 6000 never mind some crazy number like 60,000 we need to see many more realworld use and adoption before we imagine these crazy prices.
At this point I think these same investors would rather buy smaller altcoins and just bet on them becoming big like bitcoin safer and more likely bet.

Maybe right, but not all a looking for a quick 10x with BTC, others may be looking at it like gold, or a not very risky bet (if you compare to the low cap coins)

There are always some Gems coming up, let's see if the volatility there brings some nice numbers up.