Konstantin Anisimov, Executive Director at CEX.IO
BTC/USD
BTC/USD opened the trading session of 17th December at 21,376. Having breached the historical resistance at around 19,800, the pair could rise higher freely, without being restrained by any price barriers whatsoever. Therefore, right from the day’s start the pair began trending up, going in a steadily rising pattern.
Between 09:00 and 10:00 UTC, it was an hour of increased volatility, during which the pair took a wild up-and-down swing between 22,260 and 23,744. Then there were two hours of modest volatility between 10:00 and 12:00 UTC, while the pair moved relatively little up or down, and bullish price action continued from 12:00 to 17:00 UTC. In that time, the BTC/USD climbed above 23,600. From 17:00 to 19:00 UTC, a corrective downswing briefly took the pair under 23,000.
The BTC price action on 17th December clearly showed the dominance of buying sentiment in BTC/USD. Apparently, the new liquidity that was acquired in the rising triangle from 26th November to 15th December, is now being used to pump Bitcoin to new historical highs. The quick breach of the 19,800 resistance level without a substantial price correction is also indicative of the strong motive force behind Bitcoin’s ongoing uptrend.
Presently, it is hard to predict near-term target price levels for Bitcoin since we are in a historically new price area. But it will be reasonable to expect local corrective moves along the new wave of upside price action in BTC/USD.
ETH/USD
ETH/USD opened the trading session of 17th December at 636.9 and, having added 8.8 price points in the first hour, continued sideways until 10:00 UTC. From 10:00 to 11:00 UTC, the ETH/USD pair added 26.5 price points, closing the hourly candle at 667.
From 11:00 to 16:00 UTC, the ETH/USD pair continued sideways, and took another jump between 16:00 and 17:00 UTC, rising from 665 to 674. The hourly candlestick of 17:00 UTC subsequently retraced much of Ether’s daily gains, closing at 651.2, but in the next hour the pair sank much lower to 625, however, only briefly. As a result the hourly candlestick between 18:00 and 19:00 UTC closed above the open at 655 with a very long lower wick.
As of 19:00 UTC, the pair was securely above the 0.382 Fibonacci retracement level, with the retracement stretched across the sharp corrective downswing of 2018. If the pair capitalizes above the level, the 0.5 Fibo level at 816.5 may become the pair’s next upside target.
We can presently state that Ether is substantially lagging behind Bitcoin in terms of relative price gains and has not even reached half the price level of its historical high at 1,533.8. The current goal for ETH/USD bulls is a capitalisation above 642. As for more distant perspectives, much may depend on the implementation of the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap, namely the introduction of sharding technologies into Ethereum’s network.
