We will return to publishing a more thorough crypto-update next month.
This month, enjoy a mini update.
Bloomberg’s Galaxy Crypto Index closed at 1,996 on March 15 continuing its downtrend since last November. On a longer-term basis, the index has been in a sideways mode since early 2021.
Top Cryptos by Market Cap and DeFi Coins Tables
Top NFTs and Metaverse Coins Tables
The crypto market is not entirely quiet. You can find three-digit, four-digit, and even five-digit percentage point gainers in those lists.
BTC’s Market SQN
BTC is coming out of a Strong Bear market direction and is now in Bear. Van’s indicator is not predictive of the price so you would not want to make the assumption that BTC will move to Sideways next but that is one possibility.
Top and Bottom Cryptos
Van’s ranking spreadsheet had the following cryptos ranked by their Market SQN for the closing on March 15. The high scores are relatively low and very few in relation to the entire database. The BTC Market SQN chart above correlates with the scores in the table below.
News Items of Note
- President Biden signed an executive order recently that does a lot more signaling than ordering. The administration wants to communicate that the crypto industry is important to the US and that the federal government will research ways to use cryptos and protect average investors. Thank goodness!
- The EU voted to hold off imposing new taxes on miners for proof of work (POW) cryptos (like Bitcoin). Because of the environmental concerns about POW mining and the impracticality of banning cryptos, the regulators are exploring ways to make mining such coins much more financially unattractive. Stay tuned for future developments in this area.
- Bloomberg had a piece mentioning that Bitcoin is turning 13 this year. Human teenagers tend to find the teen period turbulent and defining. The reporter noted turbulence and defining will also characterize cryptos in the coming years.
- After calling cryptos “rat poison squared” at one point and predicting that cryptos would “come to a bad ending”, Mr. Warren Buffett (through Berkshire) just invested $1 Billion in a financial firm that is heavily involved in cryptos. Wait, what? Perhaps after doing some math, Berkshire’s analysts found a good ending in the square root of cryptos – crypto infrastructure. Berkshire has been trimming traditional finance sector holdings like Mastercard and Visa while investing in fintech companies, including Nubank, a Brazilian company focused on cryptos.
- The Super Trader crypto system that Van has written about on occasion for these updates has been in cash for some months now. BTC would have to gain more than 10% from its current level to register a buy signal. We’ll watch it and let you know next month if it finds an entry. Until that signal happens, an uptrend in BTC or the altcoins is unlikely to get going.
- One of the great promises of cryptoassets is decentralization – freeing value from the state – wealth freed from politics. Inflation is one example of what governments do to a fiat currency. The Russian invasion of Ukraine provides another example – a bit more dramatic an instance. Look at what average Russian citizens have experienced in the last few weeks for the Ruble’s exchange rate. (The EUR/RUB chart has the same structure.) Liquidity dried up and the Ruble value was halved in days. Now, the Ruble is down “only” about 25% from levels a few weeks back.
Source tradingview.com and currency.com
The invitation here is not to jump into “volatile” cryptos but to consider various scenarios and think through your answer to a question – Should you diversify your holdings to include assets out of your home country’s fiat currency? And if so, how?
Overall Commentary
This is a free newsletter to the VTI community. It makes no recommendations so don’t buy or sell anything based on what you thought you read in this article. Instead, we provide this update monthly to help our readers understand how traders and investors might think about making money with cryptoassets. There are unique and significant risks in cryptoassets – you could lose entire positions without knowing what happened – as happened to Van several times. Do your homework, come to your own conclusions, and seek the advice of financial and technical professionals before making any transactions.