Is Bear turning Bull?

Last month, most of the bitcoin futures contracts were bearish as traders forecasted a downtrend in value of Bitcoin. However, according to recent data, current futures are mostly betting ‘long’ on bitcoin’s price — predicting that BTC’s value will be rising shortly.

Bull and bear

The introduction of Bitcoin linked futures contracts brought a lot of hype and overheated the cryptocurrency markets when they were first announced in early December of last year. Following the announcement of the futures, bitcoin’s market value spiked to over $19,000, however the currency has seen a 40 percent loss in value since then. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has been tracking Cboe’s futures market performance. Since December the CFTC’s reports show that futures traders were betting against the price of BTC, indicating bearish sentiment and spot prices followed the contract predictions. However since last Friday, CFTC data is telling a very different story as the contracts are overwhelmingly bullish — meaning Cboe traders expect the price to rise.

This week’s CFTC report states that leveraged positions show 1,142 contracts are ‘long’ (betting the price will rise) while only 518 contracts are ‘short’ (betting the price will drop). The data is in stark contrast to the weeks prior when Cboe contracts bet way more ‘short’ as contract counts indicated shorts overwhelmed longs 4 to 1.

However according to today’s Bitcoin chart, we would say that we are not quite out of Bearish territory just yet. Given that the Chinese new year is coming up in two weeks, we can expect a fairly stagnant market for a little while longer.