Bitcoin’s wild weekend gyrations buck efficient market theory

“People always tout bitcoin as 24/7, 365 liquidity, but what that actually means is you have periods of thin liquidity,” said Nic Carter, a partner at crypto-focused venture firm Castle Island Ventures. “If you want to deploy $500m of bitcoin, you probably want to do it during core banking hours.”

The crypto market is relatively nascent. Bitcoin, the original crypto, brought forth the movement a little more than a decade ago. According to Greg Bunn, chief strategy officer at digital-asset firm CrossTower, the market remains hugely fragmented from an infrastructure standpoint.

Many platforms operate under different standards and with “different philosophies”, said Bunn, who spent decades with firms including Citadel and Deutsche Bank. Yet it lacks a centralised market structure akin to that of traditional assets, which tend to have common means of custody and settlement, for instance.

“If you think about the structure, that makes it conducive to things that are going to be volatile and where you’re going to have big moves,” he said. “That’s obviously going to be impacted by when people are trading, when people are awake, when people are watching the markets.”

To Binance. US CEO Catherine Coley bitcoin’s wild weekend patterns are reminiscent of her time trading currencies in Hong Kong in the early 2010s. Volatility sometimes became subdued during lunchtime lulls and around holidays. Professional traders, she says, tend to keep Monday-to-Friday schedules, so it makes sense that liquidity — or how easily an asset can be traded — would wane on weekends.

More difficult

What is seen as liquidity requires a steady supply of both buyers and sellers — an ease in freeing up the value of one asset for another. If there are fewer buyers than sellers — or vice versa — it makes transactions harder, a situation that usually leads to either a spike or crash in prices. Last weekend, bitcoin’s price was “absolutely ripping on low liquidity”, said Coley. “In these periods of illiquid times, you’re going to be getting pricing that is a little bit cushioned.”

That could mean someone with a large sell order cannot as easily unload a position over weekend trading. “To some extent, it’s going to be more difficult for them to offload the risk that they’ve got,” she said. “So that’s where you see these weekend moves of dramatic price spiking.”

No-one knows for sure and theories explaining bitcoin’s weekend action abound. Bitwise Asset Management’s COO, Teddy Fusaro, says it’s also possible liquidity providers and market-makers are lightly staffed on weekends, which can lead to volatility.

“It’s a feature of the market that has always been there and we expect that it will be a feature of the market that remains into the future,” Fusaro said. “Efficient market hypothesis people would assume that the market should price in the idea that there could be less liquidity on the weekends.”

Mati Greenspan, founder of Quantum Economics, says that while institutional players have been in the spotlight recently, retail investors could be re-entering the space again, as well. They played a big role in bitcoin’s notorious 2017 run-up — and many got burnt when it crashed the next year.

Bitcoin trading volume has increased, hitting a record recently, with about $80bn changing hands weekly, according to data from researcher Messari.

“We’re breaking through barriers at breakneck speeds,” said Greenspan. “This entire move from $10,000 to $40,000, this is mind-blowing and I’m saying this as someone who witnessed 2013 and 2017 — it’s just much bigger.”

Bloomberg