Will 2017 be the best year for Bitcoins? While it’s difficult to give an exact answer, the signs seem to be strongly in favor of the cryptocurrency, which is getting closer and closer to its all-time high record of 2013 – $1150. But while 2013 was a year where drastic price jumps and drops were a regular thing on the Bitcoin market, 2016 was less plagued by such severe fluctuations, although not entirely.
What’s interesting to note in 2016 was that the price hasn’t seen so much strong volatility despite negative news, except in the case of the Mt. Gox Exchange. Where a few years back hack panic might have sent the price tumbling down, people nowadays seem to be less afraid of accidents and hack attacks and fonder of the increasing value of their Bitcoin wallets.
Only in the past month there have been several reports of high-profile Bitcoin company heads being hacked for BTC, the latest being KeepKey CEO, Darin Stanchfield, yet the markets remained stable and did even better than before. This gives hope for a new period of stability, one which will hopefully begin with 2017.
Bitcoin Over $1,044; Bulls Keep Pushing
In the past week since our last update, the price of Bitcoin saw little fluctuations, despite the holidays, and has been on a steady rise that is yet to be challenged. The lowest point was noted on Friday when the priced briefly dipped down to $930.47, while the highest it got was today, when, at the moment of writing, the Bitcoin price hit $1044.90.
The past week was marked with high trading volume as well, which remained steadily around $200 million, except for January 1st, when, normally, it was sliced in half. Currently, volume is at $198,524,000, while the market cap is at another all-time record high of $17.1 billion, which together with the price stability is a good sign for those who hope to see the price keep going up.
Our technical analysis shows little signs of reversal below current support of 1040, with 7 out of 12 technical oscillators and all 12 moving averages sending a buying signal. The SMA 100 is still above the SMA 200 with a wide gap, hinting at a further path upwards. However, 4 oscillators, including the Stochastic, show that Bitcoins are being overbought, so don’t get your hopes up just yet.
From the current trends, it seems that the price is headed for further growth, unless bulls decide to change sides and profit on their trading. If that happens, we might see a push backwards. As always, keep an eye on the market if you want to stay on top of surprises.
Microsoft to Soon Implement Bitcoins in Excel
Great news are coming to all Bitcoin traders who use Excel to drill their market data. Namely, after revealing that they were developing support for Bitcoins in their Excel spreadsheet, Microsoft have officially confirmed that they will be rolling out the feature in 2017. The native Bitcoin support is one of a series of updates that are currently still in development stage but will be released in 2017.
As Martin Butler, General Electric Account Executive at Microsoft, stated, any Bitcoin traders will soon be able to import, format, analyze and calculate any numbers given in BTC currency. The new feature will be launched across any office platform, but a head start will be given to Windows Excel 2016, Online and Mobile Excel, as well as Excel for Android. Soon enough, traders will be able to make trading calls even from their smartphones.