In a spectacular reversal of fortune, cryptocurrency Bitcoin is on target as the best performing investment for this year.
After a colossal collapse from being worth almost $20,000 in December 2017, the value plunged as low as $3,169 a year later.
Bitcoin stumbled along floating between $3,500 and $4,000 until the start of April 2019, when someone lit the blue touch paper and the value sky-rocketed, gaining more than $4,000 in a few weeks.
Now, Bitcoin is trading at $8,183 after hitting a high of $8,883 earlier in the week.
According to news web site CCN, Bitcoin has jumped in value by 67% so far in 2019, beating the rest by some margin – and this was before the cryptocurrency smashed through the $7,800 barrier.
All’s well in the cryptoverse
Second best performing asset is US oil, up 38.35%; the NASDAQ 100, which has risen 22.5% and Standard & Poor’s 500, which increased by 16.54%.
Gold, considered a haven for investors in troubled or volatile times, is down 0.12%.
And the good news for other cryptocurrency traders and investors is Bitcoin is hauling the rest of the market up by its bootstraps.
The other big hitters in cryptoverse, Ripple XRP and ethereum are also showing well.
XRP may not be near the last 12-month high of $0.78 hit in September, but is trending upward after tracking the $0.30 mark for most of the year. Current trading values XRP at $0.38 – a good way of the low of $0.24 posted in August last year.
Profit taking fears
Ethereum, third in market cap behind Bitcoin and Ripple XRP, is following a gentler upward trend.
At $208.31, ethereum is at the highest price since November 2018 after a long slide down from a 12-month high of $741.82 recorded in May 2018.
The question as always with cryptocurrency is how long these high levels can be sustained?
Why the market is moving up when stock markets are going the other way mainly due to worries about the USA/China trade war is unknown.
And where there is no reason for the movement, many cryptocurrency traders will be thinking about taking some profits before the bottom drops out of the market, as it has done many times before.
