Bitcoin by the numbers

In trading, we can exploit extremes, such as price behavior outside standard deviation, the open and close of a market, news events, and more.

Unusual events and any abnormality provide an opportunity to stack odds in the market participants' favor.

One such edge is the irregular behavior of price near numbers that have been preconditioned into our subconscious since childhood, denominations of our paper currencies.

Prices approaching the numbers 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 trade differently than other price levels.

You have already noticed, I am sure, me placing limit orders for targets not like, let's say, 100 but rather 99.97, 99.92, 99.86 and 99.83.

(Why these specific four numbers? Well, if you'd join me for the hundreds of hours I spend backtesting and crunching numbers, watching the tape and comparing fills, looking for icebergs, and consistently making notes, you would agree that these levels, under the priority of risk aversion, are the most suitable ones to get a high likelihood of fills with little slippage and prices to be reaching such levels, to begin with.)

While certain aspects can generally be generalized and compacted into principles, Bitcoin presents an exception.

Bitcoin, in part, represents a whole basket of crypto but, on the other hand, stands on its own as an individual trading instrument. (other factors play a role, too)

For our situation at hand, with prices near 100k, it is worth examining how prices traded in the past near "significant" numbers.

After first examinations like this, the lengthy route of in-depth numbers crunching starts to examine through time frames and considering time intervals, volume, transactional behavior, and anything one can think of.

With probabilities extracted on likely future price behavior, we can stack our seasonal, end-of-year price spurs, monthly and quarterly calls, and any other principles that can be stacked in this specific 100,000k instance.

In this brief example, we only checked for price pops approaching new "significant" numbers from lower price levels for the first time.

Of course, it is just as important to have such data also for the price behavior after the first penetration of the "significant" level and the overall percentage move versus risk parameter examination to map out one's anticipated plays for possible participation.