Want one more reason to hate the fat cats? How about blatant price manipulation of bitcoin by ETF providers: Blackrock (IBIT), Fidelity (FBTC), Bitwise (BITB), and Ark Invest (ARKB).
In the month of September, these 4 fat cats have intentionally been manipulating the price of bitcoin. Aggressively pushing it to it's most recent high of $87,265.50 on Sept 21st at a time when retail investors are looking at the US 10year T-bill jump over 5%, the fed bump interest rates 25bps, the price of oil skyrocket, and the USDX hit a 7 week high. By all accounts, investors should be fleeing risk on assets like Bitcoin and the stock market. Yet the S&P 500 is also eyeballing an all time high. Why? Because that's the narrative they want technical traders - the overwhelming majority of which are retail traders - to see.
Like many retailers, I was waiting for the bitcoin pullback only to see it balloon past $80k, then $82k, $85k and then $87k before finally settling in the $86k range. The 'big 4' as I'll refer to them have the ability to easily move the price of bitcoin and appear to have been routinely doing so. A quick summary of their recent activity:
Sept 3: 4 of 4 accumulate $690.9M - bitcoin rises from $77.3k to $81.3k (+$4k or 5.2%)
Sept 10: 4 of 4 distribute $235M - bitcoin drops from $78.3k to $76.6k (-$1.7k or 2.2%)
Sept 15: 4 of 4 distribute $406.3M - bitcoin drops from $78.2k to $75.6k (-$2.6k or 3.3%)
Sept 18: 4 of 4 accumulate $430.7M - bitcoin rises from $76.4k to $80.9k (+$4.5k or 5.9%)
Sept 21: 4 of 4 accumulate $930.9M - bitcoin rises from $81.2k to $86.6k (+$5.4k or 6.7%)
----When they act in unison, the average price movement is 4.7%...talk about a get rich quick scheme.
But if their strategies are buy and hold, why are we also seeing massive inflow and outflow days, and if they aren't colluding to manipulate the price of bitcoin to move it in a particular direction - why are 50% of the days examined in perfect synchronization? Are there any clues retail can spot that causes these ETFs to move in and out of positions? If anyone has any ideas - i'm all ears...because that's the secret sauce...
