Week of 12 February 2018: Bitcoin gains 28.77% and Ether 12.67%, then Sunday reverses
How much of a sharp weekly gain survives when both assets peak on Sunday and then reverse within hours, and what does the gap between BTC and ETH suggest?
BTC rose from 8,063.82 to 10,383.43 (+28.77%) and ETH from 808.58 to 911.00 (+12.67%). Both peaked on Sunday 18 February at 02:00 UTC, then reversed: the week's worst day and largest hourly move both landed that day. BTC closed 7.21% below its 52-week high, ETH 21.41% below.
What the data shows. Both assets set their weekly lows at 00:00 UTC on Monday 12 February, at 8,053.00 for BTC and 807.46 for ETH, close to their opening prices. Both weekly highs then arrived at 02:00 UTC on Sunday 18 February — 11,274.00 for BTC and 978.50 for ETH — with the low before the high in both cases. Later that Sunday, both assets recorded the week's largest hourly move (-5.23% for BTC and -4.13% for ETH in the hour starting 05:00 UTC) and the week's worst day (-5.94% and -6.08%). BTC's best day was Wednesday 14 February (+10.72%); ETH's was the same day (+9.21%). BTC's range was 40.0% and ETH's 21.18%. BTC closed at 72.4% of its weekly range, in the upper third; ETH at 60.5%, in the middle third. Dollar volume was $3.03bn for BTC and $0.86bn for ETH.
What it does not show. The candles give no reason for Sunday's reversal. They also carry no funding data for this week, so nothing here indicates whether leveraged longs or shorts were paying each other. With no prior weeks in the record, this week's return cannot be ranked against history, and volume cannot be compared with an earlier average.
What a careful desk would check. Realised volatility, the size of the swings that actually happened scaled to a yearly figure, reached 114.3% for BTC and 91.4% for ETH. A week that opens near its low and closes well below its high, after a climb through the week, tests any position sized on the earlier days. The Sunday hourly move of -5.23% is the relevant figure for stop and margin settings, not the average week.
Ether against Bitcoin. The two moved very closely hour by hour (correlation 0.93), but BTC gained 16.1 percentage points more, so the ETH/BTC ratio fell 12.5%. This was a shared direction with a clear leader.
What would change this reading
- If a later week closes below BTC's weekly open of 8,063.82, the climb through the week reads as a move that was fully retraced.
- If ETH continues to trail BTC, the -12.5% ratio shift becomes a trend rather than one week's divergence.
- If BTC holds above its weekly low of 8,053.00 while volatility falls from 114.3%, the week reads as an absorbed surge.
- If Sunday's reversal is followed by another early-UTC hourly move near -5.23%, the pattern of late-week reversals warrants attention.
Terms
- realised volatility
- how much the price actually swung over a period, expressed as a yearly percentage
- close location
- where the closing price sits between the week's low and high, as a percentage
- hourly correlation
- how closely two prices moved together hour by hour, from -1 to 1