New Year's Market Update: Consolidation While Price Holds in $430s

Been a while since our last market update, hope everyone has had a great holidays.

Since we last posted about the nasty Christmas dump where Santa dropped coal in all the bulls' stockings, there's been not much action. We've had basically some consolidation, flatness, chop, not even a very smooth range.

​Here's how Huobi looks:

Slightly drifting up here since Christmas and into New Year's, but nothing special. Just consolidation. Sentiment-wise, we have some interesting things going on in the futures markets. Over at OKCoin there's still discounts in the contracts out to biweekly:

Interesting to see such a bearish curve at this point. We've had a consolidation period over the week and every time there's been a selloff it's been bought up fast. Nevertheless, there's increasing discounts there on OKCoin. 

​At BitMEX there's also kind of a flat non-bullish sentiment reflecting in the premiums:

It seems neutral more than anything right now, perhaps even a sign of just confusion more than anything. This will end up resolving itself one direction or another, either we break down below $400 or get back to testing $500.

BTC-E was in a premium to other USD exchanes for a while but that is no longer the case:

There was some hope that this premium on BTC-E was a sign of a major bullish pump, but it never materialized.

Over in China the premium has been back and stable at about 1%. As with the BTC-E premium there was some hope this was signaling a major move up, but bulls were disappointed:

The current market status right now would be a state of meh. Despite discounts on Weeklies and Biweeklies at OKCoin and other signs of bearishness, it's actually really good news that we are above $400 and sticking around with good support. 

Bitcoin has survived the Western holidays, and in the coming months we'll have some interesting Chinese dates like their New Year.