This post should have been published yesterday, but due to the fork I was unable to do anything at all on STEEM until today. The post is relevant though (ignore the date) - I suggest that you read it.

BTC dipped a little earlier than I predicted it would

This caught me a little off guard; but in retrospect, it shouldn't have.

BTC - 25 Sept - why the dip? I'll tell you why...

As can be seen above, BTC still had a way to go before it should have reversed, at least I think so. Here is a slightly more zoomed out view of the same chart, so that you can see what triangle I am working with:

Yesterday

Yesterday I predicted a turn at about $6830 (the short-term 0.382 Fib level). That didn't happen. It is now apparent that BTC turned bearish today and will not be hitting that level, at least not as part of the previous climb.

In this chart from yesterday (which now also contains the price movements of today), I predicted the probable path of BTC price as that designated by the dotted arrows: first the red and then the green. The dashed green arrow was a remote possibility.

But BTC turned earlier than it should have. Why? What does it mean?

Why? What does it mean?

Well it's really rather obvious when you think about it.

The crypto market is very stagnant at the moment. Volume is incredibly low. I hold several alts that are trading less than $1000 a day! Good alts. Alts which are probably going to be worth a lot of money one day! (At least they should be!)

The crypto market is largely unregulated. This has its Pros and its Cons. I like an unregulated market. I enjoy trading with the kid gloves off. I enjoy playing the long game to beat the short and medium-term players. I enjoy watching how the whales... ...wait, I'm coming to that in a second. Regulation helps in may ways, sure, but I'll always choose freedom and responsibility over the safety of an over-regulated "prison" (like almost all financial markets currently are).

The above two points combined create the perfect opportunity for market manipulation. This is probably the biggest one of the "Cons" of an unregulated market. But such is life; you can't have your cake and eat it.

In short: I believe that market manipulation is to blame for the premature drop in price. This makes sense. We all (most of us) expected BTC to climb for another few days and another few hundred dollars. This means that there is money to be made for those shorting BTC when everyone else is expecting it to continue climbing. They wouldn't even have to short: a simple "sell-and-rebuy-at-lower-price-levels" would also do the trick, although probably with reduced profits, so I doubt anyone does it that way; though that is how the actual manipulation takes place (partially).

I wasn't even going to write about manipulation today. I just wanted to look at BTC price movement again (let's face it, BTC is one of the few interesting things happening in crypto at the moment, the alts are all dormant, apart from the odd event such as the STEEM HF20). But while I was looking at the BTC charts I noticed something just to the left of my chart:

This is a sell wall. It drives prices down. I snapshotted this not too long ago. What you see is a 100 BTC (roughly) wall actively pushing the BTC price to lower levels.

Now I know my readers aren't idiots. I know that you are aware of things like market manipulation, sell walls and the actions of greedy whales. But from time to time we get so caught up in the markets and in our TA, that we forget about all the manipulation taking place in the background: manipulation like we are seeing today. And when I say "we", I speak as much to myself as to my readers. I was the one making the price reversal point prediction yesterday, and I will admit: the chance of an early price reversal due to market manipulation was the last thing on my mind when I did so. Don't be like me readers: remember that these things can happen at any time. The less you expect them to happen, the more they will happen, because the more the manipulator catches people off guard and stands to gain.

In case you doubt the manipulation or you don't watch order books much (I stare at order books for hours at a time sometimes, just to watch manipulation and price movement. Yes, I know; I'm a bit eccentric.), take a look at what happened next:

Four minutes after the first screenshot I took another one:

Where did that sell wall go? That was a 100 BTC order that vanished into think air! A minute later I took another screenshot:

Oh never mind, the wall is back again, only now it is suddenly a buy wall!

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how prices are played around with in crypto. No doubt it happens elsewhere too, but it crypto it is very rapid and very blatant. Remember that.

So the question is then: What does this mean?

Well nothing really. 100 BTC is still not much in the bigger picture, even if the same stunt is repeated on several exchanges. BTC is still trading over 700 000 BTC per day, so the long term-effect is negligible. I now expect something more like this to happen: (blue arrows)

The converging triangle will continue and we can still look forward to a low of about $6150 (still just a thumb-suck), before another small (probably) climb to within the vicinity of the 0.236 Fib level.

I hope to see an end to this manipulation someday. It should come. If regulation doesn't put an end to it first (let us hope that regulators don't get given that sort of power), then eventually the size of the market will make such things impossible. In the same way that you can't devalue a major fiat currency like USD or EUR by dumping a few hundred thousand dollars of it onto the market, crypto will also grow large enough to shake off such attempts by individuals. Sure you will have collaborative efforts by syndicates seeking to do the same thing, but the market will still remain more free and fair than fiat (and in the long-run, far less manipulated too!).

Trade carefully and remember not to count your chickens before they hatch, because some greedy manipulator out there is counting on you to do just that!

Yours in price manipulated crypto,
Bit Brain

All charts made by Bit Brain with TradingView

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by Bit Brain

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