Forex and Cryptocurrencies Forecast for January 11 - 15, 2021
First, a review of last week’s events:
- EUR/USD. The dollar has been falling, and the EUR/USD pair has been rising accordingly since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last March. And now it is no longer far from its Q1 2018 highs. True, the result of the last three weeks can be considered zero. And the blame is not only the Christmas and New Year holidays, but also the growth in the yield of US Treasury bonds, coupled with the hawkish statements of the Fed representatives.
After the certification of President-elect Biden and the majority of Democrats in the Senate, the yield of 10-year-old American Treasuries skyrocketed, pulling the dollar with it. The President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Thomas Barkin, said that the growth in Treasury yields confirms the desire of investors to see higher interest rates on USD, and the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Patrick Harker, predicted that the curtailment of the QE program could begin in the second half of 2021. All this sharply reduced the appetite of the bulls, who began to close long positions in EUR/USD, as a result of which the pair ended the week at 1.2225;
- GBP/USD. The storms associated with the signing of the Brexit agreement subsided, and, following the EUR/USD, the GBP/USD pair took a breather. Having reached a high of 1.3705 on January 04, by the end of the week it returned to where it had already visited in mid-late December, and finished at 1.3560;
- USD/JPY. Three weeks ago, we predicted the movement of the pair from the central line to the upper border of the medium-term channel, along which it has been sliding smoothly south from the end of March 2020. This is exactly what happened. Twice, on January 4 and 5, after bouncing off the central line, the pair went up sharply, approaching the upper border of the channel at 104.10 on January 8. A small pullback followed, and it froze at 103.95. Note that the 104.00 zone has been a strong support/resistance level for the last four months, from which the pair has repeatedly bounced off in one direction or another;
- Cryptocurrencies. it was 12 years ago, on January 3, 2009, that a person or group of people under the nickname Satoshi Nakamoto launched the main bitcoin network, mining a genesis block with 50 BTC. A few days later, on January 12, the first bitcoin transaction took place: Satoshi Nakamoto sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney. And more recently, in July 2020, information appeared on the Whale Alert Twitter account that before his mysterious disappearance more than ten years ago, Nakamoto managed to mine 1,125,150 BTC. Now, when bitcoin has reached the mark of $41,000, the value of these coins would exceed $45 billion, and Nakamoto would have taken the 25th place among the richest people on the planet.
Here, in fact, we have already announced the most important news of the past week: the quotes of the main cryptocurrency exceeded $41,000 on Friday, January 8. Thus, starting in December 2020, in just five weeks, each BTC coin grew 115% heavier.
Which pleases not only investors, but also miners. December turned out to be their most successful month in the last three years. According to the analytical service Block Research, in December the total revenue of miners reached $692 million, which is almost $1 million per hour.
At the moment, the cryptocurrency mining market is dominated by China, which, according to some estimates, accounts for more than 50% of the global hash rate. The head of Ripple even called Bitcoin and Ethereum cryptocurrencies controlled by China.
By the way, about Ripple. The last week and a half have given some hope to the owners of this altcoin. Recall that while the rest of the top coins were growing in price, the XRP/USD pair, starting from November 24, was steadily going down. Starting at $0.77, it fell to $0.17 by the end of 2020, shrinking 78%.
But this is not all either. The biggest disaster awaited Ripple in the futures market. On December 23, the price of the March futures for this token fell to $0.00023 on the BitMEX derivative platform. Investors sold 80 million coins in one minute - this is how the market reacted to the lawsuit of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which accused this startup of illegally selling securities under the guise of XRP for $1.3 billion.
Now the situation has stabilized somewhat, and XRP/USD is quoted at $0.31 on January 8. And if a trader placed orders in advance to buy Ripple at the minimum price, then they made a profit of 1350% in just the last two weeks.
Returning to the main cryptocurrency, we note that its volatility, of course, is not as cosmic as that of Ripple, but it still remains more than impressive, reaching 10% per hour. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index is in a very overbought zone: at 95 out of 100. But, despite this, following the BTC/USD quotes, the total crypto market capitalization continues to grow steadily, having reached $1.1 trillion. At the same time, the bitcoin dominance index came close to 70%.
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