This was a great week for every asset class except the cryptocurrencies. Ethereum took the biggest hit, falling 25.6% to close at 9.3 grams. Bitcoin also fell hard, giving up 21.1% and closing at 161.9 grams. The strongest assets were stocks, led by the Euro STOXX 50 index, which rose 4.5%, closely followed by the Nikkei and the Dow Industrials.
The Japanese Yen was the weakest government-issued currency, gaining 0.3%. The US Dollar was strongest, rising 1.7%. Short term bonds added 1.8% while the long term TLT rose an impressive 3.2%.
All the major stock indexes were very strong. Even gold stocks managed to gain 0.9%, ending the week at 4.1 grams.
Oil and precious metals were little changed, ranging from platinum's 0.2% loss to crude oil's 0.3% gain. Copper was the strongest commodity, rising 2.9%. Coffee and cotton gained 2.5% and 1.3% respectively.
Bitcoin is down about 2/3 from its all-time high, and sits about where it sat at the bottom of the February "flash crash", and about where it was 4-5 months ago, on the way up to the peak. It has violated the "doubling every 4 months" uptrend line, but would need to fall by another 2/3 from here to violate the "doubling every 9 months" uptrend line. This leaves a lot of room to roam while still remaining in an exponential uptrend. It will be interesting to see how far the decline ultimately goes.
For those interested in switching out of Bitcoin and into other cryptos, rather than banking profits in the form of gold or government issued currencies, it is worth noting that Bitcoin has actually been rising in purchasing power recently. For instance, consider DASH: at the start of this year, 1 BTC bought about 13 DASH, while today it buys about 23 DASH, an increase of over 75%.
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