Bitcoin in the News : 2018-09 More++

In last week's post, Bitcoin in the News : 2018-09 Price, I noted,

None of the stories in Cointelegraph's Analysis category attempted to explain the drop at the beginning of the month.

Here's a similar chart showing just the week when the drop occurred. For the record, 5 September was a Wednesday.

It's not a very good chart. The only prices shown are from the midpoint of each day (noon?, GMT?) and are connected with a straight line. The first story I read about the drop was from CNBC:-

• 2018-09-05: Bitcoin falls after Goldman reportedly drops crypto trading plans (cnbc.com; 'Published 9:00 AM ET Wed, 5 Sept 2018 Updated 4:50 PM ET Wed, 5 Sept 2018') • 'Bitcoin slipped below $7,000 Wednesday after a report that Goldman Sachs is abandoning plans to open a trading desk for cryptocurrencies. Goldman still sees the regulatory environment as ambiguous, according to Business Insider, which cited people familiar with the matter.'

By coincidence, the second story I read was from Business Insider:-

• 2018-09-05: Bitcoin price: Cryptocurrencies drop suddenly with no explanation (businessinsider.com; Sep. 5, 2018, 4:09 PM) • 'Cryptocurrency prices plunged across the board suddenly and sharply Wednesday morning, seemingly with no clear reason. Having been steady at about $7,350 a coin during most of trading during both Asian and European morning hours, bitcoin lost more than $200 in mere minutes starting about 5:50 a.m. ET, or 10:50 a.m. BST.'

Both stories, from CNBC and from Business Insider, pointed to another story from Business Insider:-

• 2018-09-08: Goldman Sachs is ditching near-term plans to open a bitcoin trading desk, instead focusing on a key business for driving Wall Street investment in crypto (businessinsider.com; Sep. 8, 2018, 2:49 PM)

Note that the 'earlier' story is dated three days after the 'later' stories. There is probably a good explanation for this, but I can't think of one. The CNBC story has a detailed price chart showing a steady price followed by two sharp drops: one just before 6 AM (EDT) and another at 7 PM. It's hard to believe that unconfirmed news about a single trading desk could cause such a sudden price shift, but what do I know? Then there was another sharp drop into the following day. I wonder what caused that.

Bitcoin in the News : 2018-09 Price

The price chart for September is a bit different than it was for last month's Bitcoin in the News : 2018-08 Price. When I tried to capture the monthly price chart on 1 October, I received only current prices with no chart. When I tried to capture the same chart while preparing this post, I received the normal chart with the first week of September missing, because the monthly chart only goes one month back. The first week of September showed a large price drop, so I couldn't just ignore it. What to do?

Since February, the Cointelegraph price service has offered the possibility of entering a from-to date range. I set this to 1 September through 30 September and received the chart shown below. The data granularity for a specified date range appears to be a full day; the granularity of the monthly chart appears to be six hours. That accounts for the difference in the look of the chart.

Bitcoin Price Index

None of the stories in Cointelegraph's Analysis category attempted to explain the drop at the beginning of the month. Of the 30 or so stories in the category, one in particular caught my attention:-

• 2018-09-11: The Crypto IPO Race Is On: From Mining Companies to Exchanges • 'Last week, at least two crypto-related enterprises, a Silicon Valley stock and cryptocurrency trading platform Robinhood and Singapore-based crypto exchange Huobi, moved closer to going public by holding an initial public offering (IPO).' The ‘old school’ way to collect investments might seem especially attractive in the context of mass adoption trends and a declining ICO market, which now sees its hardest slump in 16 months.

Using Cointelegraph's tag for technical analysis, Price Analysis, I'll point to a sample article from mid-month:-

• 2018-09-15: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, Stellar, Litecoin, Cardano, Monero, IOTA: Price Analysis, September 14

The language in that analysis is decidedly negative. In the initial survey, it quotes a sector expert saying,

Bitcoin will resurge in 2019 but altcoins "will never come back."

The phrases 'bearish patterns', 'trend remains down', 'breakdown of the support zone', 'strong downtrend', and 'facing resistance' are used for the first five of the ten cryptocurrencies covered. The mania of 2017 is over.