Last December Bitcoin had all eyes set on it – it was barreling through obstacles, crushing resistance levels and peaking at around $20k. Just about that time, one trader decided it was time to short the crypto ringleader. His name is Mark Dow. He is back on the stage again, talking to Bloomberg about
“I’m done. I don’t want to try to ride this thing to zero,” Dow said in a phone interview Tuesday. “I don’t want to try to squeeze more out of the lemon. I don’t want to think about it. It seemed like the right time.”
Dow, a former International Monetary Fund economist who manages a family office in Southern California, took a bet and shorted Bitcoin right on time, seeing its demise in the following months to the current level, lower by 85% to its all time high. Dow, who announced Tuesday on Twitter that he’s “saying goodbye” to the short, took profits twice already this year, he said.
He detailed his reasoning for bitcoin short at the time saying “After all, bitcoin—the de facto benchmark in the space—has declined by 30% or more probably a dozen times since its inception, coming back stronger each time.
But this time feels different. It feels like a bubble. The fever in the post-Thanksgiving moonshot ran hotter than we’d seen before. We also began to see a robust supply response. Bitcoin futures were also introduced, allowing investors to short or hedge their holdings for the first time. Maybe it’s a coincidence the ATH price in bitcoin came just before brokers allowed customers to short the futures last Monday morning, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Bubbles are complex dynamics. What they all have in common, however, is they require emotion to truly go parabolic.”
“They just saw it was going up and wanted a piece of it. People’s imaginations can run further when they’re not tethered to facts, when they don’t understand the issue,” he said. “It allowed the bubble to be much larger and much more violent. I saw the psychological hallmarks of it and there came a point where it looked like the fever was breaking.”
Bitcoin and altcoins have been suffocated by regulatory swings and losses have piled on since Bitcoin Cash split in November, causing a computing power arms race — and a persistent downturn.
“People buy into these assets because they believe the narrative, and you look at the asset prices to see if the narrative is weakening or changing,” Dow said. “It’s not easy — you could be wrong, but that’s the sign you look for. But it doesn’t mean you’ll get it right.”
