First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Slips Below $43K as Ukraine Shadows Financial Markets

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Here’s what’s happening this morning:

Market Moves: Bitcoin slips as cryptocurrency trades in sync with tech stocks and geopolitical tensions over Ukraine cast a pall over broader financial markets.
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Dante Disparte, chief strategy officer and head of global policy, Circle
Don Kaufman, co-founder, TheoTrade

Market Moves

Bitcoin (BTC) is down 2% on the day, falling in line with broader markets as traders continue to assess the geopolitical tensions between Russia and the U.S. over Ukraine.

Unable to break the $45,000 mark over the last seven days, bitcoin’s relationship with global markets continues to strengthen, despite previously having been touted as an uncorrelated hedge against inflation.

Futures contracts tracking the U.S. S&P 500 share index fell by 0.5% on Thursday, and futures tracking the tech-stock-heavy Nasdaq 100 fell 0.6%.

“Bitcoin quite clearly is still viewed as a 'risk-on' asset at the moment and declining in line with broader assets and tech,” said Jason Deane, analyst at Quantum Economics.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, bitcoin, was trading in the $44,300-$43,100 range over the past 24 hours. Ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency, was trading at $3,054 at press time, down 2.5% over the same period.

For the short-term, bitcoin’s choppy trades in sync with equity markets could continue, according to Matthew Dibb, chief operating officer of Stack Funds. “However, we believe that crypto (BTC) is beginning to show some relative strength to other assets.”

Dibb predicts that in the medium term, bitcoin will break $50,000 again, though a push past the all-time high near $69,000, set last November, may take a little longer.