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Why Did the Bitcoin ETF Approval Not Immediately Impact Price?
God candle? Mass sell off? We were all wrong. So, what’s next?
Since I’d written so many articles on this subject previously, there is, of course, no point denying that I was predicting an immediate jump in Bitcoin on news of the spot ETF approval on January 10th 2024. It’s well documented.
Why? Because, well, it was obvious.
Duh.
Think about it: twice we’d had a false start, first with an announcement by Cointelegraph back in October and then a message on the official SEC twitter feed, allegedly from a hacker.
On both occasions, the market instantly moved upwards until the announcements were proven to be false, when an immediate reversal inevitably followed. Two dry runs? You don’t get a better indicator than that.
However, in the days immediately leading up to the announcement, there had been a growing number of voices predicting a Bitcoin price dump, something that I was personally unable to get behind. Yes, there was the traditional “buy the rumour, sell the news” argument, but I felt the maths of the matter would outweigh the sentiment.
In fact, in the last major Twitter spaces that I attended as a speaker before the ETF announcement was the Crypto Town Hall with Wolf of all Streets (Scott Melker), Ran Neuner and Mario Nawfal. In that spaces too, the consensus was that price would drop on approval. I still wasn’t convinced. In my mind, even these ‘big names’ were also completely wrong.
Except, of course, when the announcement was actually made — for the third time — nothing at all happened.
Bitcoin just traded sideways and completely ignored the thousands of people, companies and organisations looking at it.
What happened?
A false start
Part of this had to be the fact that there had been two false starts already in my view.
Those people who had sent the price instantly upwards on two occasions only to be wiped out immediately had reacted on gut instinct and paid the price.
