Week of 26 February 2018: Bitcoin gains 20.07% while Ether gains 2.99%
When Bitcoin and Ether rise together but by very different amounts, how much of the week reads as a broad move, and how much as one asset separating from the other?
BTC rose from 9,590 to 11,515 (+20.07%); ETH from 841.46 to 866.66 (+2.99%). The ETH/BTC ratio fell 14.22%, so the two did not move together in size. BTC closed at 97.7% of its weekly range, 1.78% below its 52-week high, while ETH was 25.23% below its own.
What the data shows. BTC set its low of 9,350 on Monday 26 February at 08:00 UTC and its high of 11,565 on Sunday 4 March at 23:00 UTC, in the final hour of the week. Its best day was Monday (+7.65%), its worst Wednesday (-2.43%), and its largest hourly move +2.85% in the hour starting 07:00 UTC on Tuesday. BTC closed at 97.7% of its weekly range, meaning the close sat very near the top of the week's spread. ETH followed a different shape: its high of 897.49 came on Tuesday 27 February at 08:00 UTC, and it drifted to close at 866.66, only 52.2% of the way up its own range. Realised volatility, the size of the swings that actually happened scaled to a yearly figure, was 81.1% for BTC and 53.6% for ETH. Dollar volume was 1.97 billion for BTC and 0.29 billion for ETH.
What it does not show. The candles record direction and size, not cause. Nothing here identifies who was buying or whether the gains were sustained by fresh demand. The data also covers only two weeks of history, so no long-run comparison of this return is available, and no volume-versus-average or funding figures can be given for this period.
What a careful desk would check. A BTC return of 20.07% with realised volatility at 81.1% is a large move, but with only two weeks on record a desk cannot rank it. The Wednesday day of -2.43% shows that gains of this size still contain daily reversals of more than two percent, while the Tuesday hour of +2.85% marks the week's largest single-hour move upward; both are worth weighing against a week in which BTC still closed near its high on Sunday.
Ether against Bitcoin. The two assets moved with hourly correlation 0.85, high but not near-perfect. The ETH/BTC ratio fell 14.22%, a 17.08 percentage point gap in weekly return, so this was partly a Bitcoin-specific move rather than a broad rise in both assets.
What would change this reading
- If BTC holds above its weekly open of 9,590 in later weeks, this week reads as the start of a trend rather than a spike.
- If the ETH/BTC ratio stops falling after a 14.22% weekly drop, the divergence was a one-week event.
- If BTC trades back towards its weekly low of 9,350, the Sunday high of 11,565 set in the last hour of the week will look less decisive than the close suggests.
- If ETH approaches its Tuesday high of 897.49 again, its lag was timing rather than direction.
Terms
- realised volatility
- how much the price actually swung over a period, expressed as a yearly percentage
- close location
- where the closing price fell within the week's high-to-low range, as a percentage from the low
- ETH/BTC ratio
- the price of one Ether expressed in Bitcoin, which shows whether ETH is gaining or losing against BTC