Week of 4 November 2024: Bitcoin gains 16.86% and Ether 29.52% in one week
When both assets post weekly returns in the 95th percentile or higher, how much of the move came from single days, and what does the loose hourly correlation between them add to the reading?
BTC rose from 68,775.99 to 80,370.01 (+16.86%) and ETH from 2,457.73 to 3,183.21 (+29.52%). Both set their weekly lows on Monday 4 November and their highs on Sunday 10 November. Wednesday 6 November alone added 8.94% to BTC and 12.35% to ETH; weekly returns ranked at the 95th and 98th percentiles of 351 weeks.
What the data shows. Both markets bottomed in the same hour, 21:00 UTC on Monday 4 November (BTC 66,835, ETH 2,357.59), and climbed to their highs on Sunday 10 November, late in the UTC day. The largest hourly move for both came in the hour starting 02:00 UTC on Wednesday 6 November (+2.74% BTC, +3.46% ETH), and Wednesday was the best day of the week for both. Monday was the worst (BTC -1.35%, ETH -2.42%), so the low preceded the high. Trading activity ran well above normal: BTC dollar volume of 24.43 billion was 2.27 times its prior twelve-week average, ETH's 12.26 billion was 2.51 times. Both closed in the upper third of their weekly ranges (close location 92.3% and 92.7%). BTC finished just 0.30% below its 52-week high; ETH remained 21.75% below its own.
What it does not show. These are price and volume records. They do not identify who bought, whether the buying was leveraged, or what continued after Sunday's close. The concentration of the gain in Wednesday's session is visible; the reason is not.
What a careful desk would check. Realised volatility, the size of the swings that actually happened scaled to a yearly figure, reached 54.8% for BTC and 72.8% for ETH. A 95th- and 98th-percentile week is hard to size positions around, and a desk would ask whether its risk limits, set during the three up weeks and one down week before this one, still match an hourly move of 2.74%.
Ether against Bitcoin. Hourly correlation was 0.68, below the 0.7 threshold this desk treats as tight co-movement, while ETH outperformed by 12.66 percentage points and the ETH/BTC ratio rose 10.83%. The correlation measures how closely the two prices tracked each other hour by hour; it does not, on its own, identify the mechanism behind the divergence.
What would change this reading
- If the ETH/BTC ratio gives back part of its 10.83% rise in later weeks, the outperformance reads as a rotation that reversed rather than a lasting change in leadership.
- If BTC trades back below its weekly low of 66,835, the week's 16.86% gain will have failed to hold.
- If funding rises far above its 0.0109% eight-hour average while price stops advancing, the cost of holding longs becomes the constraint to watch.
- If volume falls back towards its prior twelve-week average while price holds, the advance is thinner than this week's activity suggests.
Terms
- percentile
- the share of past weeks with a lower value; the 98th percentile means only 2% of the 351 recorded weeks were higher
- hourly correlation
- how closely two prices moved together hour by hour, from -1 to 1; 0.68 means they moved together loosely
- funding rate
- the periodic payment between long and short holders of a perpetual futures contract; positive means longs pay shorts