End of the third week of December. Maybe the rally extends up to Christmas.
But no farther.
The historical record of price action for bitcoin is remarkably easy to predict:
As you can see from this chart, November is the best month to own bitcoin, with a cumulative return of 526%, in this particular month, since 2011, not including this month.
October is usually a very good month for bitcoin with a cumulative return of 325% since 2011.
I predicted September would be lousy and I was not wrong. It dropped 5% for a cumulative LOSS in that month of 42% since 2011.
It’s not hard to figure out where the price of bitcoin is going, for the most part.
So here is my prediction for December and January.
The key data point to know is the start of the Chinese New Year. That’s when the Chinese traders pick up their marbles and go home.
It’s starting later in 2021, February 12th. In 2020 it started on January 20th.
bitcoin in December has a ho-hum cumulative return of 22%.
A closer examination of the charts from the last five years would show that bitcoin starts strong at the beginning of December and then fades at the end, sometimes quite dramatically.
With a delayed start to the Chinese New Year, I would think the current rally to bitcoin might last until Christmas. But in the last week of December? Look out for a correction.
And January is the second-worst month for bitcoin with a cumulative -22% return over ten years.
Conclusion
These predictions don’t always come to pass. If you look at the winter of 2018-2019, November was brutal with a price decrease of 34%. And in December it went down another 10%.
But that’s because rumours (which turned out to be true) hit the market that Bitfinex (one of the oldest and largest Hong Kong crypto-exchanges) had been ripped off by their banking partner, to the tune of $800 million USD.
It looked like another Mt. Gox in the making. Fortunately, it didn’t turn out that way.
Take out Mt. Gox and the Bitfinex bank swindle, and the pattern in bitcoin price swings is easy to see.
DJ
Further Reading
If you want to check out the articles I have written on bitcoin price swings for the last three years, here they are:
A Good Time To Buy (written late September)
Why January is the Worst Month of the Year (written in 2018)
A Good Argument to sell (Written in August)
The Future of Crypto (Yet another story about Chinese New Year January 2019)
When will Bitcoin Rapture Occur?
