I've never seen anything quite like this. This whole drop appears to be being bought margin long on Bitfinex. Interestingly, about a week ago, there was a similar mass closing of short positions and opening of longs at a similar price region.
As seems to be my common refrain - I'd prefer to show this action on a shorter chart than 15m where the action is clearer, but alas, that's the shortest we can publish on.
The SEC hearing on whether ETH is a security is planned for later today. I'm somewhat surprised we didn't have some strong statement or signal leaked as news today, given how the Congressional testimony and G20 events earlier this year played out. The argument that ETH is a security appears pretty weak, would be massively disruptive, would run counter to the previous very bullish statements by regulatory heads before Congress earlier this year, and in general would shoot the US in the foot in the international cryptocurrency gold rush. It seems extremely unlikely that the news from this hearing will be anything other than bullish.
So, that's my working hypothesis here. I'd be concerned if the longs started closing in massive number, but unless that happens, this looks like a very cynical but extraordinarily bullish set of whale games. Exact bottom hard to guess, but I don't think you need to catch the exact bottom here. Possible that whoever's doing this tries for another leg down to build even further, but I'm not counting on it.
I was personally long ETH before this and based on this read I'm basically throwing everything I can move around in crypto at it, so I guess I have my neck out pretty far on this if I'm wrong.
I'm an amateur hobbyist and your definitely shouldn't take anything I say as financial advice. I'm interested in any feedback.
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So this only got weirder over the course of the day. We got a second dive which closed more shorts and opened even more longs.
Then we got news that there's unlikely to be any news and a mountain got made out of a molehill. Since the original mountain reporting was done by the WSJ, the molehill appears to have been taken very seriously by a lot of people.
...still, somebody or a group of somebodies went very long on ETH today for some reason. It's less clear why now, but they are getting a very nice bounce relative to where they opened those positions already.
I'm pretty happy staying long based on that read, but I'm going to have to watch this like a hawk now to see if the long positions start closing in a big way.
@neamtuioan, It looks like a mountain was made out of a molehill of an internal meeting. Now, it's possible that this was still a significant internal meeting and there are insiders who know what happening behind the scenes and are actually trading on it. The general public apparently won't be finding out today regardless.
Either way - somebody *did* still get very very long on ETH for some reason. The question is when/if these long positions start closing. They're already decently in the green based on the bounce since then, so it's hard to say, but I'm still looking at that as my likely signal for when to get out of ETH.