Are cryptocurrencies less affected by market noise?
My noise canceling headphones are working super fine; I can truly enjoy tuning out the rest of the world to focus on what I'm doing, without anyone or anything distracting me. I just wish there was something like that, but for markets. Something to block all of that market noise and focus on pure empirical evidence that markets provide.
Oh, but wait a minute; there is such a thing and it's called crypto! Those brilliantly decentralized currencies that answer to no one except market flows and empirical evidence. Yes, those digital currencies are the best when it comes to fighting against market noise and misinformation that happen in the markets from time to time.
Old School Cryptos
Ever since Bitcoin's debut approximately a decade ago, an increasing number of traditional market traders and experts have found their way into the crypto space, in one form or another. More importantly, the creator of the highly used technical tool Bollinger Bands, John Bollinger, expressed his interest in the instrument.
Bollinger was rather impressed with these cryptos which seemed to function much like the stock market of old; before all the noise began disrupting price actions. He then went on to test his theory and prove it, mind you.
Yes! Cryptos are essentially noise-free - as in, they're traded based on pure technical rules with very little deviation from the analysis. We're not talking big boys here, we'll come to that in a moment, but essentially almost every single cryptocurrency out there is noise-free.
At the time of this article, bitcoin sits at $9,520 with $175.5 billion market capitalization.
Financial markets - and the stock market in particular - are being affected by automated traders and algorithmic trading which, in my opinion, is a plague on the markets - but that's a topic for another time.
You see, with all of the automated trading, markets have become extremely noisy. And the volume generated by these machines makes it really hard for traders to truly understand market price movements; whether from a technical or fundamental indicator point of view. No one really knows the market moving power these automated traders have anymore.
So with cryptos essentially free from such noise, pure technical and fundamental analysis prevail and things turn clearer when trading.
The Downside
Ever since the resurgence of bitcoin from below $1,000 to above the $20,000 mark, many investors and traders alike have ventured into this instrument wanting to make a pretty penny trading cryptocurrencies.
Even the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) jumped on board and started offering cash-settled bitcoin futures trading (CFD) - although bitcoin ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund) still eludes regulatory approval.
The introduction of crypto CFDs and futures modified trading on these instruments, however only slightly. It's not sure whether these new instruments have affected the overall price level of cryptocurrencies, but they did make the trading a little noisier; and that's what we'd expect.
Such a situation has already happened in the stock market, with the introduction of stock index futures. It basically hit those markets which did not already have futures, and so the noise got louder.
Futures activity, hedging activity and things like that create what is known as non-directional noise. It's noise that is not based on supply and demand, or trends, but based on the transaction mechanics of trading, and we're starting to see that phenomenon bleed into some of the cryptocurrencies; but it's nowhere near as serious of a problem as it is for, say, U.S. equities.
The Verdict
So what's the verdict? Well, cryptos do have immunity when it comes to market noise and the overall transactional mechanics of trading. And I personally believe that these markets, due to their unregulated nature, have been exempted from becoming too mainstream for traders of this world. Which gives these markets a certain edge they can end up using to their advantage.
This article was submitted by Royal.
