While Guzman Y Gomez (ASX:GYG) listing on the ASX was the biggest event of last week, it did overshadow something else – the first bitcoin ETF to hit the ASX.
VanEck’s Bitcoin ETF listed just above $20 last Thursday, but the price had fallen on Tuesday afternoon -2.8% to $18.56/sh.
The Thursday listing was less watched than that for Guzman, and sits down -7.48% on a weekly basis (compared to Guzman’s +31% gain.)
So what can we gleam from day 3 of the stock’s run? In short: Australian investors are clearly wary on crypto.
Not helping matters in that department is a decline in the bitcoin price we’ve seen this week. Prices had fallen by as much as -8% overnight on Monday, but as at 1.20pm AEST, the bitcoin price had recovered to US$61,243 (A$91,925.)
That puts it down -5.6% over the last working week.
Year to date, however, spells a more positive story for bitcoin. The grandfather crypto asset is up 41.7% over the six months to late June after sitting dormant through most of 2023, in what many dubbed a “crypto winter.”
Just consider that as of Tuesday arvo, the bitcoin price is up 101% over the last year.
As for Bitcoin, it’s actually topped the all time highs it hit in 2021 when stimulus checks, COVID lockdowns, and a whole lot of free time pushed mammoth amounts of liquidity into crypto markets.
The same was true for equities broadly.
And, in line with the US tech-driven 2024 YTD stock rally, bitcoin prices have staged a recovery – further evidence that there’s a strong correlation between ‘traditional’ stock market activity and that on crypto markets.
Many crypto fanatics may resist such a correlation, but as the asset class gets older and more historical evidence builds, it’s a hard relationship to dismiss.
While bitcoin fell early week, some ‘alt coins’ – smaller cryptocurrencies often made by individuals which can be as low as a fraction of a penny – had risen, but, the ‘alt-coin’ class of crypto is typically far more high-risk than the increasingly mainstream offerings of bitcoin and its secondmost competitor, ethereum.