The way Monero is behaving in the exchanges is showing bad signs. It looks like it has decoupled from bitcoin and if bitcoin starts moving and Monero price stays the same or go down against fiat that would mean a trend down is forthcoming. I am getting scared.
Why? This has happened over and over the past 3 years. Get used to it. Put on your seatbelt or panic sell and make me/us richer.
Edit - Sorry, but it's never been "coupled" with btc. it's moved the opposite more often than not. If you are in for the short term, you are bound to get #rekt, sorry.
I would disagree with you. Over the last three years XMR has basically behaved like all the other alts and its value judged against BTC has moved appropriately as BTC's value has moved. When XMR has changed its own inherent value ie its value against USD, this has provided a different value against BTC.
These sorts of relationships have become more tenuous since before the Christmas period and XMR seems to have become more reliant on sentiment (as pointed out by Kurious).
Over the last week we have seen XMR value being hammered from all sides (see my post a couple of pages back) and not even responding to improved sentiment.
What scares me is that no-one here seems to see the beating and are trotting out 'cultist' stuff about having blind faith -- the BTC wall observer thread has been doing this for years now, I thought we were better than that.
Unsurprisingly I agree with this (thanks Nano). It is indeed the case that traditionally we have gone down when BTC went up and vice versa. However, we were coupled - almost nailed - to the BTC price in the last BTC spike., which meant (as we stuck around the 0.015 mark while BTC rose up) we hit a USD ATH for XMR.
This was remarkable, it may have been the GUI release and yes, sentiment about XMR - but we were actually lifting in value along with BTC. Traditionally we should have gone down. Hard.
Unfortunately, we stayed pegged on the way down, too and lost a similar amount of value to BTC in fiat terms, instead of spiking up as alts have often done as BTC drops sharply. We went up to the $17 USD mark and have come back down now to under $12 - which is a pretty large drop.
Now we seem to be less fixed and rises in BTC have seen us go under 0.014, which we didn't drop under through the huge hike in BTC.
During the hike, we were gaining so much value, we went over a $200 m market cap - which took into the top 3 or 4 temporarily. We looked like we were as good an investment as BTC.
So we had a rise almost exactly mirroring BTC, but came down with it, too.
In the past few days, the 'coupling' seems to have gone back to more 'normal' patterns. It's as yet unclear if BTC spikes again if we will follow, or drop. While the price has 'looked stable' - peak to trough has been a large value loss in fiat terms. Nano is right to say it's been a beating - but it might well have happened even if BTC had stayed flat because of the GUI, Ring CT and new exchanges being added anyway. It might also have settled back down.
All is not doom and gloom though - XMR should plot its own course and I am sure it will. With all that is happening in BTC the waters are very choppy so dips and rises will happen, but the XMR price is still way above $10 and only two other coins on Polo (both of which are nowhere near the quality of XMR, or IMHO, its value) are currently higher in USD terms.
I think we're fine and I have been buying the dips happily. Patience is a virtue and the crypto market is not ours to shape (yet), but we're in good shape all the same.
