Bitcoin: A Good Risk/Reward Investment? | Crypto Markets

So Matti, Bitcoin growth has been slowing down lately. And prominent trader Peter Brandt expressed some concern that if current parabolic phase is violated, we could expect either an 80% correction of 7 months advance or a smaller correction with definition of new parabola. What do you think about this analysis? Do you agree?

So first of all, I disagree with the premise. I don't think that it's been slowing down. I think that it's been kind of. Well, we could say that crypto has been cooling off. I mean, we saw some massive gains this year so far. And we could take a look at the rising Trend line since April 2nd. We had that big pop on April 2nd and this is basically a very, very steep incline. So the fact that it's been kind of consolidating lately, this basically shows that it's taking those massive gains and kind of etching them into the actual, the actual value of the currency. This morning I tweeted out a nice triangle formation that was coming where we could see it was coming to a head around 11,300. About an hour after I tweeted this though, we did see a breakout to the upside, but that's really on the short term. Overall, what I think that Peter was trying to do was give us kind of just a worst case scenario. And I know, I'm pretty familiar with Peter Brandt's analysis and his trading style and what he always likes to stress is the asymmetric risk that lies in cryptocurrency. So, meaning that you have 100% risk on the downside and on the upside, if we do see a parabolic rise, you know, you could see bitcoin going to 50,000, $100,000 or even more. So a lot more than 100%. That's a very good risk to reward scenario for high risk investors.

So I would like to ask you now about the Deutsche bank latest decision to shrink its investment bank operation. This decision led to a cut of 18,000 jobs. So why do you think Deutsche bank took this decision and what do you think is going to be the impact on the crypto world?

What happened with Deutsche bank in my mind is that they've basically cut off the investment arm and the trading. Most of the trading desks at Deutsche bank and those trading desks have been largely unprofitable over the last few years. We have to realize that we're right now in a unique situation that we've never seen in history as far as the global economy, where central banks around the world have kept interest rates artificially low. Many of them at zero, some of them even below zero. So what happens is that the bond market has basically taken all of the yields and dropped them to the floor following the central bank. So right now, an investor who sees a 2% opportunity over the course of a year, they're just getting hungry over that. And in my mind, this is basically, it means that there isn't a lot of meat on the bones as far as global investments are concerned. So, you know, an investment bank like Deutsche bank, usually they make their money off of those yields, they make their money off of, you know, lending money. And if they can get, you know, 5% or 6%, they're doing great. But the global environment just doesn't allow, allow for that because you have central banks who are buying bonds that have even negative yielding interest. So what it basically means is that following the financial crisis, we've been in kind of an emergency mode and we talked about, or the central banks were talking about exiting that emergency mode. But since the start of 2019, they're actually going in deeper, providing more and more liquidity into the market, which is pushing down yields further and further and further. So in that environment, it's very difficult for any investment bank to really make money because that's where they make their money from.

So talking about crypto exchanges, lately, major crypto exchanges like Huobi and Erisx have been implementing high frequency trading, which is a type of trading that allow clients to trade at much higher speed than, than regular clients. So can you actually expand a little bit on the advantages of high frequency trading and maybe tell us what you think about the future of this practice in the crypto trading world?

Yeah, it's an interesting progression, no doubt. I mean, high frequency trading has been available in traditional markets for a very long time. It's a particular, particular advantage for algo trading and robot trading. It'd be interesting also to understand how exactly they offset that. Obviously it's not going to be really possible to have a high frequency trade in Bitcoin that's settled in real time. Because we know that bitcoin is not settled, you know, quite that quickly. You know, a bitcoin transaction can take, you know, 10 minutes, an hour, sometimes two hours, depending on the fee that you allocate, which whereas high frequency trading, we're usually talking about milliseconds. So very likely those brokers will need to take some of the exposure onto their book. But what it shows is that the market is now mature enough where those brokers can come in and do that. Acting as a market maker for those high frequency traders. So in general, I think that it's a very good sign that the market is more stable now. And I believe that having that option will also bring more stability to price because robots and algos, they're generally getting price feeds from several different locations. So now that they can act on those arbitrage opportunities a little bit quicker, or even much quicker in some cases, they basically take out the arbitrage opportunities, which means that the price across all brokers should remain more stable going forward.

So you pointed out that peer to peer bitcoin trading has spiked, reaching a level which we haven't seen since last November. So what do you think is the significance of this indicator?

Yeah, so local bitcoins is a website where people can trade bitcoin with each other. So peer to peer, this website is Coindance, which basically tracks the volumes that are happening on local bitcoins. And you can see this little spike over here which brought us up to $65.6 million within a week. This is the largest volume that we've seen since November. And basically, and we have to also remember that local bitcoins recently reduced some of the options for, you know, let's say peer to peer trading versus fiat money and stuff like, or cash, cash trading. They've reduced their options in Iran, I believe. So it's interesting to see that their volumes have been increasing pretty gradually since the start of the year. But what's most interesting to me about this chart is that we can see the overall level since 2017. So if we take a look around here, this is where bitcoin volumes first surpassed $50 million per week. That's in, in September of 2017. And as you can see very clearly, it hasn't really gone much below that level since that time. So what we're seeing here is that bitcoin once upon a time was trading on a very low level. And at this point we can see the maturity of the market, how much these volumes have grown. Now if we do see another spike like, like we saw in 2017, you know, we're on this, this assumption that there's a parabolic run happening and a massive leap forward in adoption. This could very easily happen again like it's happened in the past, where we see, okay, peer to peer volumes suddenly at, you know, 5 billion and then come down, relaxation down to, you know, half a billion or whatever it is at the time. So I think that this is a very clear sign that people are using bitcoin for its intended purpose, which is to transfer value, store value, and trade it peer to peer. Cointelegraph like subscribe and Hodl.