Last weeks high: $109,555.48
Last weeks low: $99,643.66
Midpoint: $104,599.57
A new Bitcoin ATH as President Trumps second term officially begins! Just shy of 110K with a much tighter range of 10k from range low to high leaves Bitcoin in a very interesting place going into what has been called the first "pro-crypto" administration.
Now the weekly close is an interesting one as there is a clear sell-off that has continued at time of writing bringing the price down below the weekly low. This has been a common theme in recent weeks as either a bearish SFP of the weekly high early in the week resulting in a sell-off for the remaining days. Or the opposite were a sweep of the weekly low early on results in a recover rally for the rest of the week. As of right now the later is in play but what is causing this sell-off this time?
The AI issue:
The recent headlines have been that the US wants to win the AI war and be the dominant force in what is possibly the most important product of the future. OpenAI, Grok, Meta etc all have AI products and services and the US government hope that by backing these companies the US can be the victors of this race. However, the game has changed with the release of "DeepSeek R1" a chinese AI competitor with some remarkable attributes that has the US stock market very worried as reflected in the pre-market.
DeepSeek R1 was reportedly built for 6m, now this is a Chinese company and therefor any numbers should be taken with a pinch of salt but OpenAI has raised 17.9B for ChatGPT and many now see DeepSeek as a superior product in many ways:
- Less GPU intensive due to a more efficient and streamlined model, this is mainly why NVIDIA pre-market is down 11% at time of writing, investors are seeing that perhaps US companies have overblown the demand for GPU's as the product they are making is not optimised in comparison.
- Considerably cheaper due to this streamlined approach, personally this is a symptom of how America has been operating as a nation since the pandemic, a severe lack of efficiency made up for by throwing insane amounts of capital at the problem with no thought as to where the money comes from (printed via QE & tax payer funding). DeepSeek just proved why Trumps planned approach of getting value for money and increasing efficiency is a winning formula, anything else is unsustainable.
- Open source code, we would expect the company called OpenAI that was founded on the basis of transparency and the mission to do good as a non-profit would be the product that has publicly available code, but no that would be DeepSeek... This further compounds just how out of touch the US based AI companies have got, the quest for revenue has taken over as the mission goal, which in the case of AI is very dangerous.
To conclude the AI problem, the Chinese AI product is cheaper, more efficient and more transparent that current US based products and that is why indirectly BTC took a tumble.
On the data news this week FOMC is on Wednesday, the forecast is for interest rates to remain unchanged however the volatility of FOMC often leads to interesting price action, this could be another reason for the sell-off as de-risking takes place.
For this week I am looking at using the chaos to find goo d long entries, I still think that Feb-March looks good until I have reason to think otherwise. Weekly low is a key S/R level that will determine by bias in the short term until then.
TL;DR
- DeepSeek R1 worrying investors of US AI companies as the Chinese AI product is far cheaper, more efficient and more transparent. US stocks down on pre-market.
- FOMC midweek, first of Trump admin, volatility expected.
- Weekly low key S/R level for BTC