Greedy Fearfulness or Fearful Greed

Compass 123

A fundamental improvement

• Last week, it looked like our price momentum indicator was on the brink of passing into bullish territory. Looking at our speedometers, the opposite happened: We’re back in the deeper negative. Not surprisingly this puts us solidly in Bitcoin Season territory (market type speedometer): Higher beta Altcoins are less desirable in a negative momentum environment.

• The price momentum of Bitcoin has taken a significant hit due to the FUD created by movements in the U.S. government's BTC holdings. Additionally, the transfers from Mt. Gox, which moved just over 47,000 BTC as part of their refund programming, compounded the situation. Nevertheless, these recent movements have not triggered the fear among investors that was seen in previous weeks, as it appears the creditors have not sold off significantly. In the short term, we interpret this loss of price momentum as a delay in Bitcoin's price push toward the $70k zone and beyond.

• A significant development here is that fundamentals moved to bullish. The market is slow to follow them, but they show ecosystem health and underline the lack of sustainability we see in the current bearish price action that we will explore below.

Speedometers indicating the current state of BTC.

Biden flashes his cards in reaction to Lummis-Trump.

• Shortly after U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis announced her intention to introduce a bill to create a Bitcoin reserve, the Biden administration made its move. On Monday, the U.S. government transferred 29,800 BTC from its holdings (of the total 210,000 BTC), splitting them into two wallets—with 19,800 and 10,000 BTC each—in two addresses with no prior transaction history.

• It is speculated that this wallet movement is part of a custody agreement between the U.S. government and Coinbase. Whether intended for sale or not, these wallet movements were not coincidental.

• Swissblock’s indicators show a continued high sensitivity to external factors in Bitcoin’s price, which means that keeping on top of this newsflow is particularly relevant.

Risk has eased.

• We witnessed the peak of the Risk Index at the beginning of July, hitting its annual highs as the price fell to $53k. Moreover,