This long bear market has drained the energy and finances of many people. Particularly if they got directly impacted by the messes created by the UST collapse, Celsius, FTX, and BlockFi, to name only the most prominent ones. Or if they use cryptocurrency earnings to help with their daily expenses, which rose to new heights while crypto prices are a fraction of what they were in the bull market. Or if they have a crypto-based business to run.
Personally, I understand people who get beaten down by the bear market. I used to be in the same situation in the previous bear market. But now I have a different kind of energy and I look at things more detached and following my path.
But this is not a post that tells you how to deal with the bear market or how I do it. I've done that too, and others did. In many cases, it requires some sort of personal experience to grasp what is going on and how you should react (or not react).
For the last few days crypto prices - and those of the stocks of tech companies - are on the rise.
Is it enough to draw the conclusion the worse is behind us? Maybe. I'll explain a bit later.
Does that mean the bear market is over? Probably too soon for that. Coinbase has just let go of another fifth of its employees. Splinterlands is cutting server costs (which were huge) to save money. By the actions of these two companies alone, we can see they don't expect the bull market to start very soon, or at least they prepare for the possibility of an even longer bear market. Coupled with the economic situation at the macro level, things may drag on for a while.
So, is the worse behind us? As the sideway movement was finally interrupted by this interval of prices going up, we might enter a period with higher volatility. If that happens, news, both positive and negative may have a higher influence on the price.
For crypto, there was good news this week when the bankruptcy attorney said 'over 5B' in assets were recovered by FTX, compared to about 1B initially estimated, from 8B total.
But the cryptocurrency world doesn't work in a vacuum, and it was most often correlated with technology stocks.
When the risk-on sentiment returns, that's when both of them will most likely start to go up in an explosive way. Until then, I believe there won't be enough energy for a push up, and if nothing dramatic happens, probably the support we had at the beginning of the year at around 15.5k for bitcoin is pretty solid (that doesn't exclude a dip below).
In conclusion, my opinion is that the worse is over but not the bear market. We might grind close to the bottom for a few more months.
Don't take investment decisions based on such posts. Do your own research and filter information through your own mind.