The ‘January Effect’ Pushes Bitcoin Above USD 8K, While Alts Drop Against BTC

After another strong rally on Tuesday, the most popular cryptocurrency, bitcoin (BTC) is back above USD 8,000 again, increasing its gains this year to more than 15%. Meanwhile, all major altcoins are in red against BTC today.

At pixel time (08:49 UTC), BTC trades at c. USD 8,320 and is up 5.4%.

While the whole market capitalization increased by almost 4%, to USD 221 billion, bitcoin dominance, or the percentage of the total market capitalization, jumped by 1 percentage point, to 68.35% in the past 24 hours.

BTC price chart:

“Bitcoin and gold are well supported due to rising tensions between the US and Iran,” Emmanuel Goh, who runs crypto derivatives tracker Skew, told Bloomberg. “Professional investors are also back from the Christmas break and starting to deploy capital — this is called the January effect in the stock market.”

In January 2019, BTC dropped by c. 6%, before starting climbing higher in February. In January 2018, BTC also rallied around the same time in the first decade of the month, before continuing its infamous crash in 2018.

BTC price in January 2019

BTC price in January 2018

Other major coins from the top 10 are showing mixed results against USD, while litecoin (LTC) is the second best performer in this club today (+5%).

As reported yesterday, popular crypto analysts and traders are discussing the recent rally, but not many seem convinced that this particular rally will last, let alone lead to new all-time highs.

However, Mati Greenspan, the founder of Quantum Economics, stressed that “what’s encouraging about the breakout is that it has come with strong volumes and drastically improved sentiment.”
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