Bitcoin Recovers as Futures Expire – Trustnodes

The January futures expired this Friday at 4PM London time and they may have contributed to some extra volatility this week.

Thursday gave another dip for bitcoin to $36,000 which was re-tested again yesterday with it seemingly doing a higher high and a higher low today on hourly candles.

The Nasdaq chart looks a bit different by comparison as there is no recent higher low with it up only circa 1% from 13,100 on Monday to 13,335.

Bitcoin has gained more than 10% during the same period, with it remaining unclear whether Nasdaq is affecting bitcoin, or bitcoin is affecting Nasdaq.

You’d think the latter because a lot of stocks on Nasdaq, including mining stocks, track bitcoin rather than vice versa, and so a bitcoin fall may contribute to a Nasdaq fall.

The fall itself is due to many reasons, initially Omicron fears which have now led to a -0.7% fall in GDP in Germany in the last quarter.

That’s due to control freaks very unwisely imposing a lockdown on the unvaccinated who may have acquired natural immunity.

France in contrast has smashed records, growing by the highest level in 52 years at 7%. US also saw a 6.9% growth in the fourth quarter.

With Omicron quickly out of the way in free countries like US and UK, chatter turned to interest rates which now may have reached peak mania as some claim there may be 7 hikes this year.

Ukrainian tensions you’d think would add to bitcoin, but this week it may be futures that played more of a role.

An incredible 110,000 bitcoin equivalent contracts exchanged hands on CME on Monday, worth about $4 billion.

That’s while price fell, so we can maybe guess what bet Wall Street made, with the bitcoin futures ETF stuck in trying to time as they have to keep selling the contracts for the expiring month, to buy the ones for the next month.

It used to be thus that futures would be felt on a Thursday or Wednesday during the expiry week, but frontrunning may be pushing them back to Monday as far as very surface observation can tell for the past two months.

Capo Gensler (SEC gestapo chair) keeps refusing a spot ETF, leaving US grandpas to discounted Grayscale or futures ETFs where they have to play revolving chairs.

So now that they’ve expired, this pressure might ease and we may even get buying from the futures if they’re rolling the contracts, so potentially adding some demand.

Nasdaq seems to have calmed down a bit as well now with it up 0.85% at the time of publishing, so we’ll have to wait and see if bitcoin now keeps on sidewayishing-ly recovering as a new month nears.