The trade of a lifetime: BTC (yes, you heard me)!
Never to be equaled again
On May 1st, BTC hit a weekly low of $56,500. That was a 23% drop from its all-time high of $73,835.57, which it reached on March 14, 2024.
And that short-term (~6-weeks) price fluctuation, all by its lonesome self, caused weak hands to lose their collective sh*T!
(( Yet, as I’m writing this, late on Friday, May 3rd at 5pm PST, BTC sits at $62,804 ))
Here’s my starter point to this post…
It seems like some people just won’t get this through their thick skull:
In spite of BTC’s price volatility, it’s still FREEDOM MONEY — It allows anyone in the world to store value and send value, without permission, while not being debased or censored!
“Freedom, from what?,” you ask?
Look, it’s Friday evening and I don’t really feel like being on the screen much longer. Plus, I think I’ve already covered the answer to that question, adequately, all over this blog. And especially via this short post on my personal flakebook feed (yes, flake-book).
But, friend Wayne Shirreffs sends us all a reminder:
We are still in a bull run, a positive liquidity environment, and a global debt crisis where the only possible outcome is even faster debasement of the [fait] currency.
Earlier today, commodity trading legend Peter L. Brandt — his story his here. Truly, he IS a frickin’ legend — made a post giving his take on why there will never be another market again like Bitcoin ($BTC).
I want to pass it along in it’s entirely so you have a dedicated spot here, right now, to understand the technical price behavioral patterns of this one-in-a-lifetime digital monetary asset.
by Peter L. Brandt
2024 is my 50th year anniversary of the first futures market trade of my life — it was for contracts of bags of pre-1964 Silver quarters and dimes.
I have traded at best-guess 35,000+ futures contracts in my life, covering everything from Corn to Gold, treasuries to Copper, Sugar to Palm Oil, Lumber to Cattle, stock indexes to shelled eggs, Iron Ore to Idaho Potatoes.
I can say with no pause that there has never been a market like Bitcoin. Sure, some of you ask, but what [about] Alt-coins and memes? Well, these proliferations owe their existence to Bitcoin.
What makes Bitcoin so unique?
There are two things I point to:
The nature of the asset itself – non-hackable (at least so far), limited quantity, globally accepted, trackable, almost instantly transactional.
The price behavior of the asset.
This blog post focuses on the second point above — the price discovery history of Bitcoin. Here are the unique features not attributable to any other asset I can identify.
Repeated multiple X price advances. Just to name them:
2009 to 2011, 3,191 X advance
2011 to 2013, 572 X advance
2015 to 2017, 122 X advance
2018 to 2021, 22 X advance
2022 to ????, 4.7 X advance to date
Even though Bitcoin’s advances have been subject to exponential decay, the advance still put Bitcoin in a class by itself.
The other price behavior feature is the magnitude of the bear market crashes between the multiple X advances. There have been at least seven declines in Bitcoin larger than 50% and six grater than 75%. Thus, Bitcoin has a unique feature of making some people a huge bundle and wiping out another cohort.
The chart below is a graphic representation of the above. Not only have the major advances in BTC been according of parabolic nature, but of parabolic on log scale.
I can find no other stock, commodity or publicly traded asset that can make the same claim.
What’s next for Bitcoin?
Who knows.
I am in my late 70s and [in] poor health, so I am unlikely to witness the end of the Bitcoin story. But I have no doubt but that excitement and surprises are to come.
I remember that the stock market of the 1980s was the era of hostile takeovers of corporations. Bitcoin represents an attempted hostile takeover of the world’s currency system.
What an exciting story to follow and take part in. I feel privileged that I’ve been able, in some small part, to have taken part in this grand experiment.
Editor’s Note: Peter’s post above, formatted in its original state, first appeared here. Back to Mr. Bear below...Have questions about how or where to buy and/or trade Bitcoin?
Want to dive deeper into the world of digital currencies? There are no dumb or juvenile questions. So lay ‘em on me, if you have some.
And/or click the little 🤍 Like icon on the bottom-left. It will help “spark” the Substack algorithm, and give others on the platform a greater chance to see, and scare themselves, with my grizzly ways. ;)