Week of 16 January 2023: Bitcoin adds 8.79% after a 21.86% week while Ether lags
When two strong weeks arrive in a row but prices remain about half below their 52-week highs, what does the second week confirm, and what does it leave open?
BTC rose from 20,872.99 to 22,707.88 (+8.79%) and ETH from 1,552.52 to 1,627.44 (+4.83%), both after prior weeks of +21.86% and +20.34%. A mid-week dip on Wednesday 18 January marked both lows before Friday's best day. BTC was still 52.66% below its 52-week high at the close.
What the data shows. BTC opened the week at 20,872.99 and set its low of 20,407.15 at 16:00 UTC on Wednesday 18 January, the week's worst day (-2.15%). It then rose to a high of 23,371.80 on Saturday 21 January and closed at 22,707.88, near the top of its 14.53% range (close location 77.6%). The best day was Friday 20 January (BTC +7.57%, ETH +6.93%), which also carried the largest hourly move, +3.68% for BTC starting at 20:00 UTC. ETH followed the same path but gave ground against BTC: the ETH/BTC ratio fell 3.64%, so the pair's gains were not equal. Volume was 1.48 times the prior twelve-week average for BTC and 1.07 times for ETH, so the larger share of activity sat in Bitcoin. Both assets moved together hour by hour (correlation 0.90).
What it does not show. BTC's +8.79% ranks at the 83rd percentile of 257 weeks, and ETH's at the 64th, so the week was strong but not rare in this dataset. The record contains no information about who was buying or whether the buying was leveraged. Both assets closed the week 52.66% and 54.09% below their 52-week highs, and the data cannot say whether this stretch is a bottom or a rebound inside a longer decline.
What a careful desk would check. Realised volatility, the size of the actual swings scaled to a yearly figure, was 50.6% for BTC and 54.7% for ETH, modest against the +21.86% and +20.34% weeks before it. The Wednesday low and the Friday surge sat in the same week, so a desk would compare its intraday risk limits with the 3.68% BTC hour rather than with the calm weekly average, and would treat the ETH lag as a signal to check which leg of any pair position is carrying the exposure.
Funding. BTC perpetual funding held at 0.01% per eight hours for the whole week, with no variation between its average, high and low. ETH funding averaged 0.0102%, with a high of 0.0142%. A steady positive rate means long positions were paying short ones at a constant, small cost, and its flatness gives no reading on shifting crowding.
What would change this reading
- If a later week trades below the Wednesday low of 20,407.15 for BTC, the two-week rise reads as a pause rather than a turn.
- If funding rises well above 0.01% while price stalls, the cost of holding longs starts to matter for the first time in this stretch.
- If the ETH/BTC ratio stops falling after a -3.64% week, the lag against Bitcoin has ended and the two legs begin moving together again.
- If volume falls back towards its prior twelve-week average, the 1.48-times reading for BTC marks this week as the more active one rather than a new level.
Terms
- close location
- where the week's close sat between its low and high, as a percentage; a reading near the top of the range means the close was close to the week's high
- realised volatility
- how much the price actually swung over a period, expressed as a yearly percentage
- percentile
- the share of past weeks with a lower value; the 83rd percentile means 83% of the 257 weeks recorded were lower