I’d say that whole space is really in its infancy right now. It makes sense you’re going to see a lot of volatility there. It’s really driven by sentiment. There’s a lot of players coming into this space experimenting with different use cases. But right now I think Bitcoin has been something that has been center stage.
The comment is interesting in its juxtaposition to many traditional financiers who still preach “blockchain, not Bitcoin.” Such commentators rarely understand that the financial incentive to secure a blockchain is a large part of what makes it truly valuable. Shawn Cruz and TD Ameritrade don’t seem to suffer from this malady of thought.
At TD Ameritrade, we offer Bitcoin futures trading for our clients. We saw them get very interested when we volume spiked when it was around $10,000. On this pullback lower, there really wasn’t much activity from our client base. But now that we’re getting down to this 3 or $4,000 price level on Bitcoin, we’re starting to see our clients become more interested in trading Bitcoin again. So I think it’s going to be interesting to see what Bitcoin does from here.
Cruz also commented that as the December down-swing of the NYSE was underway, people became more interested in stashing their assets in BTC. The sentiment suggests that when regular stock markets take a beating, demand for Bitcoin should increase.
It’s really interesting as we’re seeing this volatility in the market. Watching the ebb and flows of money. Watching where it’s flowing out of and where it’s flowing into is something that if you are a market spectator, someone who really likes to pay attention to these rotations in and out of asset classes. Right now I think you are getting a really enormous amount of data.
However, if one charts the Bitcoin price and the average of all major stock market indices on top of each other, Bitcoin frequently diverges in a significant way. Again, Bitcoin is “driven by sentiment.”