Week of 12 February 2024: Ether gains 14.92% and closes at its 52-week high
When Ether rises nearly twice as fast as Bitcoin and finishes at its 52-week high while funding stays positive, what can one week of prices say about the strength behind the move, and what can it not say?
BTC rose from 48,300.00 to 52,137.67 (+7.95%) and ETH from 2,507.22 to 2,881.2 (+14.92%), a gap of 6.97 percentage points. ETH closed at its 52-week high; BTC ended 0.92% below its own. Funding stayed positive all week for both, averaging 0.0113% per eight hours for BTC and 0.0106% for ETH.
What the data shows. Both assets set their weekly lows early, BTC at 47,710.01 on Monday 12 February and ETH at 2,472.0 on the same morning, and then rose through the week (low before high in both cases). BTC reached 52,816.62 on Thursday 15 February and closed 52,137.67, in the upper third of its weekly range (close location 86.7%). ETH reached 2,895.0 late on Sunday 18 February and closed 2,881.2, at 96.7% of its range. The largest hourly moves were modest for such strong weeks: 2.29% for BTC on Monday afternoon and 2.2% for ETH on Monday evening. Dollar volume ran 1.35 times the prior twelve-week average for BTC and 1.3 times for ETH. Against 313 weeks of history, the returns ranked at the 81st percentile for BTC and the 90th for ETH.
What it does not show. Price and volume do not identify who was buying or why. Positive funding means holders of long positions in perpetual contracts (futures with no expiry) paid short holders; it does not measure how large those positions were. The data has no open-interest figures, so any crowding here stays unmeasured.
What a careful desk would check. Realised volatility, the swings that actually occurred scaled to a yearly figure, was 46.9% for BTC and 53.5% for ETH. The week's gains came without a single hourly move above 2.29%, so the advance was steady rather than violent. A desk would ask whether its position sizing assumes that steadiness continues, and whether funding, at an average of 0.0113% per eight hours for BTC, is included in expected returns.
Ether against Bitcoin. The ETH/BTC ratio rose 6.46%, and ETH outpaced BTC by 6.97 percentage points. Hourly correlation was 0.8, close but not tight, so the two moved together while ETH pulled ahead.
What would change this reading
- If ETH falls below 2,472.0, its weekly low, the move to the 52-week high reads as a test rather than a break.
- If BTC closes a later week above 52,816.62, its high on Thursday 15 February, the two assets are advancing together rather than ETH alone.
- If the ETH/BTC ratio gives back the 6.46% gain while correlation stays near 0.8, the week reads as a rotation inside one trend.
- If funding stays above 0.01% per eight hours while prices stop rising, long holders keep paying for exposure that is no longer paying them.
Terms
- perpetual funding
- a regular payment between long and short holders of a perpetual futures contract that keeps its price close to the spot price; positive means longs pay shorts
- 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 90th percentile means 90% of past weeks were lower