We expect bitcoin to find footing after April [17], tax day [USA] - Tom Lee said

[alexzorgo]

The famous analyst of Tom Lee considers that the cryptomarket will fall till April 17. This day in the USA - day of payment of taxes for 2017.
According to him, owners of cryptocurrencies who performed trading activities with cryptocurrency and the crypto-exchanges which are under jurisdiction of the USA received in 2017 in an income type for cryptocurrency transactions about one trillion dollars.
Respectively they shall pay about 25 billion dollars in a type of tax. But as most of them continues to keep the equity in cryptocurrency, for payments of a tax they should sell in large quantities the cryptocurrency till April 17.
Such sale, according to the analyst, creates and will create the additional pressure upon the market of cryptocurrencies to the middle of April.

Ultimately, we expect bitcoin to find footing after April [17], tax day," Lee said.

U.S. households likely owe $25 billion in capital gains taxes for their cryptocurrency holdings, which could result in "massive" selling of the digital currencies into U.S. dollars by the mid-April tax filing deadline, one Wall Street analyst said.

"Additionally, we believe there is selling pressure by crypto exchanges who are subject to income tax in U.S. jurisdictions," Lee said. "Many exchanges have net income in 2017 [of more than] $1 billion and keep working capital in [bitcoin]/[ethereum], not USD — hence, to meet these tax liabilities, are selling BTC/ETH."

Lee estimates cryptocurrency investors have a tax liability of $25 billion for 2017, based on the historical tendency of U.S. households to realize about 52 percent of capital gains in any single year.

Investors likely realized a record $1.04 trillion in capital gains for cryptocurrencies and stocks in 2017, Lee said. He added the combined figure is the most since reaching $924 million in 2007, just as the financial crisis was getting started and shortly before bitcoin was invented.

However, selling around tax season could abate in less than two weeks.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/wall-streets-tom-lee-predicts-massive-outflow-from-cryptocurrencies-ahead-of-tax-day.html

[ulia93]

Interesting news, I was not familiar with the taxation in the USA and did not associate the drop in the bitcoin price with the time of tax payment. Let's see what happens after April 17, but I liked the forecast that Lee gave at the end of the article: "Lee still sees bitcoin nearly tripling to $20,000 by the middle of this year, and rising further to $25,000 by year-end. He expects ethereum to quadruple to $1,500 by the middle of the year and ultimately reach $1,900 by the end of the year."