Bitcoin stalls near $63,000 as desks argue over where the bottom is
The largest cryptocurrency has spent a week in a narrow band while institutional desks split between calling a cycle low and warning of another leg down.
NEW YORK —
Bitcoin traded around $63,000 through the week, holding a range so narrow that several desks described it as the quietest stretch of the year. The asset has moved less than four percent between its high and low over the past seven sessions, a compression that usually precedes a sharp move in one direction.
The argument on trading floors is not about direction so much as timing. Desks that call this a bottom point to steady, if unspectacular, buying from long-horizon funds and to the drying up of forced selling that marked the spring drawdown. Those on the other side note that spot volumes remain thin, and that thin markets can travel a long way on modest flow.
Positioning data offers partial support to both camps. Open interest in perpetual futures has fallen from its winter peak, which reduces the risk of a cascading liquidation, but funding rates have flipped negative on several venues — a sign that shorts are paying to stay in the trade and, historically, a setup that has produced squeezes.
The macro calendar is doing little to break the deadlock. Rate expectations have barely moved in a month, and the regulatory news flow, dominated by the delayed federal rulemaking, has left allocators without the clarity many said they wanted before adding risk.
For now the market is behaving like one waiting on a catalyst it cannot name. "Nobody is selling their conviction and nobody is buying anyone else's," one derivatives trader at a New York firm said. "That is what a range looks like from the inside."