Major selloff the day after Christmas Day as Bitcoin dropped 10% in Spot markets, and even more on the futures market. Quarterly contracts were stable at $480 before making a massive drop within 6 hours down to $410, an over 15% move.
Looking at the CryptoFacilities Price Index we can get a good appreciation for how precipitous it was:
A massive dump, over 10% across the board, enough to margin call anyone who was using "moderate" leverage of around 10x, but not quite enough to be classified as a flash crash and hit those who were using 3x margin.
Another thing worth mentioning happened in the process of this selloff: the CNY premium has now evaporated and become a discount:
Last time this happened was after the big dump from the $500 test in mid November, and we were flat for almost two weeks as the CNY exchanges traded around par with the USD exchanges.
Additionally, the futures curve from OKCoin is looking as bearish as ever. It was signalling some bearish sentiment in the days before Christmas and served as a pretty accurate indicator for this big selloff. Now, the Futures Contract Spreads tool is showing an incredibly bearish sentiment:
Negative premium for weeklies and biweeklies on OKCoin, while quarterlies have an annulized premium just barely above 6%. This is almost as low as the BTC yield from Bitfinex.
So it's pretty grim for now in the bitcoin market. The sentiment remains negative and with CNY exchanges looking sluggish it's hard to see where the demand is going to come from to move this price up as we go into the new week.
Support is holding in the low $400s for now, but if that breaks it could get ugly fast. However, a consolidation period for the next couple weeks, similar to what we had when things got really bearish in the $300s in November, may be bullish sign for 2016.
