Back to the topic of the thread (the original one):
Does anyone have an explanation for the volatility? Just the weekend or is there an event I didn't hear of?
Have you heard of Chinese New Years.? have you heard of bitcoin scaling FUD? Have you heard of consolidation?
Towards the end of last week (Friday, I think that it was), I was quite nervous that BTC prices were going to retest $350..
To me it seemed that the downward price movement of about $10 was fairly rapid and on fairly low volume.
Even though currently, the price seems to be trending towards the upward end of the current volatility range, somewhat on low volume, surely, such retest of $350 could still happen within the next few days (because the price is quite closely within striking distance of such a potential retest).
On the other hand, such a retest is not inevitable, so it seems best to prepare your BTC portfolio for price movements in either direction.
I don't really buy into some of the assertions that give any significant attribution to the Chinese exchanges in directly impacting and moving BTC prices; however, there could be some indirect effects with their volume and trading and possibly even some stagnation in BTC price movements in the coming week or so (due to the Chinese new years observation that seems to be taking place this week and the likely decrease in trade volume and decreased ability for the Chinese to move fiat around in the coming week - because they close a lot of the banks during the Chinese New Years observation period).
It's kind of a guess.
Currently, I am probably a little more inclined to predicting a 5% downward movement rather than a 5% upward movement (But it is close - about 51% to the down / 49% to the up).
On the other hand, if the price movement is 10% or more, at this time, I am a bit more inclined to believing that 10% adjustment from where we are at would be upward rather than downward (Maybe about 55% to the up and 45% to the down)
All of this anticipation in spite of the ongoing scaling debate, which seems to be more and more of a non-issue (even though it keeps coming up as a supposed price problem).
