Digital Speculation & Economy

Let us understand the entire volume of money in transaction and try to ask a few questions? What is the Global GDP? How much is the world’s richest person’s share as compared to the total wealth?

A huge corpus of the money is floated around from person to person everyday – people buying at a price just to sell off to another person offering a higher price. A comparison with All Money in the bubble gives us an understanding how big a part – Digital Speculation of Financial Market is!

Ever wondered how stock price fluctuate? And what exactly is demand and supply affecting the market price to move up and down by the second?

It’s basically the bid and offer price. At any random given time, we have a number of buyers willing to buy a stock and a number of sellers willing to sell the stock at any given price. The exchange puts these ‘limit orders’ in a tabular form and decreasing order of “Buy Price” and increasing order of “Sell Price”. Bid price is the highest price (highest auction price) one is willing to pay to buy a stock. Offer Price is the least price (lowest sell price) one is willing to sell for this stock.

This is what we call the market depth. Generally, this bid price and offer price are very close to one another and offer price is slightly above bid price at any given time. This is called the Current Market Price (CMP): Offer Price for a buyer (because he will buy from the lowest seller) and Bid Price for the seller (because he will sell to the highest auction bidder).

How markets move? It’s generally BUY and SELL power. Huge buying will clear off all levels of Sell Price at the exchange and fresh bid will come thereby taking the CMP higher (higher demand). Sharp selloff can make the price come down as it will clear off Bid Price levels and fresh offers will come to settle.

Market Depth and how the Bid & Offer Prices move by the second

Now understand this. What if my intention of buying is just to sell off to the next buyer? Or in simple terms, my buying decision is simply based on the interest of the next buyer. Yes, this can happen when there’s a panic buying or selling – driven by emotions and this over a few trading sessions can end up to crazy valuations. In the stock market, some stocks to be intrinsically valued at 5rs sell at 50rs and some for 50rs sell at 5rs only.

Okay, at least for an asset class that produces something (like a farmland or a company share) – you have an entry point. A PE ratio – at what multiple of its present earnings you must pay to enter the business’ ownership! What about Gold or other metals? Or Cryptocurrency?

“BTC is an asset class that produces nothing” – Buffet

The concept of cryptocurrency is unique with hashing methodologies which can prevent time, infrastructure & cost of a conventional banking system. Though the idea has some challenges and markets do see the maximum future it can – should an idea be valued at $1 trillion with a single bitcoin trading at $57,000+?

The Power of Social Media Influence

Many of these price speculations are done not only by panic buying or insider trading – it can be as simple as a tweet or post. Provided the tweet comes a personality like Elon Musk. A stock price surging 1000% or BTC gaining a hundred billion dollars’ worth of valuation over a single tweet on a single day proves a ton on how emotions are linked with the current market price we see.

A single tweet increasing valuation of hundreds of billions of dollars is what the Power of Influence is

Will the Speculative Price Bubble Burst?

We all remember the US real estate bubble of 2007. Did AIG or Lehman Brothers see it coming 2 years in future? Super high rents on super expensive houses in New York City and thousands of defaulters and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) finally resulted in the burst of bubble and bankruptcy of a some of the world’s biggest financial institutions in Wall Street.

Can this happen to BTC? Again, forget human emotions over a brilliant idea, tweets by richest people of the planet – isn’t it too highly valued over just an idea being speculated over each trading session?

Let’s understand what a crash is.

Consider February-March downfall in world markets over Covid pandemic. Investors of the world thought it to be a disaster and since markets see as much as they can see in the future – retail investors to corporate MFs started sharp selloffs. Somewhere along the line it feels “This is the End” and slowly it persuades others to escape. The prices slowly start to be driven by emotions than fundamentals and logical possible outcomes and thereby “Panic Selling” and huge decline happens!

Similarly a bubble burst (E.g. 2008 US Housing Bubble Burst, 2000 dot-com bubble burst) happens when there is a huge rally and overvaluation of an asset driven by emotions and speculations (“People buying betting on the excitement of the next buyer”). And then suddenly the balloon bursts due to the nature of the unhealthy growth beyond logical fundamentals.

Finance amalgamated in evolving modern technology is where the world is heading towards. Maybe cryptocurrency is the universally accepted alternative for the conventional banking across the world – and maybe from 2040 to look today in 2021 BTC is still very cheap in valuation!