I have this idea that retail might not jump in this cycle like they did before.
During the last bull run, we had people stuck at home because of covid and a ton of stimulus money pouring in, which brought a lot of new cash into crypto, especially altcoins.
This time, sure we have institutions getting involved, and I get that could be huge for Bitcoin, but it might be more of a gradual rise instead of crazy spikes.
But honestly, it feels like retail investors are still recovering from the last cycle and might be less inclined to jump back in this time.
What do you all think? For BTC, it probably won't make a huge difference, but with alts, I doubt we’ll see the insane returns everyone is hoping for.
We wont see such an impact until after the current price cycle is over, as the rise in the price of Bitcoin and the increased potential to make money quickly and Bitcoin continuing to rise is what is driving more retail traders to join. Institutional investors have more market experience and better analysis than retail traders and therefore their investments will be mainly limited to 2024 and less in 2025.
When I read the "licking their wounds" part, that cracked me up, the last cycle was fun for everyone I believe, only those who got in late came out with losses, but then, that's how it always is with every investment scheme and not just in crypto.
Although it also depends solely on the type of projectz the retails invested in in the last cycle, as I see that no just bitcoin, but a few number of Altcoins have also recovered and possibly touched or even past their all time high in the last cycle.
And coming back to the topic being discussed, retails are here already, but the issue is that, they are all focused on memecoin, majority of them are on telegram playing tap tap game to earn some free money instead of investing in the market, many of this guys are probably going to invest their money at some point, but like you said, I am also not expecting much for Altcoins in this coming season, though still worth taking a shot at some really good ones with great potentials.
Mostly OG's dont put selling pressure on that market but yup if your OG = Institutional investment, yup they are gonna be the exit liquidity for the institutional investors, There are still 4 months to go for a new peak, From the beginning of this cycle my expectation by the end of 2024 was around 80k minimum and a 100k max, seems like its gonna be perfect speculation haha until now I'm pretty confident on it.
The cycle before the last was a bigger pump and there was no locked wn boredom or stimulus. It may have been a added advantage but is not a determining factor for a bullrun.
One positive is that if we get less retail investors the drop from the next ATH will not be steep. They usually chase easy profits and make quick exits.
This is not a chart of what is happening now and have you been following the market in recent months? Because if you follow the market closely, you will realize that most of the price increase is concentrated in bitcoin, only a few altcoins also have impressive growth. But with the recent correction, bitcoin has only lost nearly 30% of its value since ATH while many altcoins, especially shitcoins are seeing losses of up to 70%-80% . What is more ironic is that bitcoin price seems to have recovered above $60k but many altcoins have yet to see any significant recovery.
I also invested a little in altcoin and thought that making profit from it is as easy as previous cycles, but it is not. I realize that altcoins are having quite a hard time . Many people even predict that we will not have an altcoin season , what do you think ?
I don't really think that government stimulus contributed massively to the bull run last season. Statistics showed that most of the stimulus checks people received were spent on basic needs like food and other bills. Only a few percentage of these stimulus receivers invested from it. From these statistics, only 15% saved or invested.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/03/12/heres-how-americans-are-spending-those-coronavirus-stimulus-checks.html
I am not aware of research that has studied the behaviour of Bitcoin retail investors in the current circle, it would have been helpful. The focus this period has been on institutional investors but retailers are observing the market and taking advantage of available opportunities. But I think the most attractive altcoin investment now is telegram shitcoins. And most of them have proved to be worthless.
With each Bitcoin market cycle, it has noise on media that helps to attract new people joining this market. New people mean newbies and many of them are retail investors.
Bitcoin bubble index can satisfy your curiosity.
https://www.coinglass.com/pro/i/bitcoinBubble
You can use Google trend too.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=bitcoin&hl=en
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I also invested a little in altcoin and thought that making profit from it is as easy as previous cycles, but it is not. I realize that altcoins are having quite a hard time . Many people even predict that we will not have an altcoin season , what do you think ?
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I think we will get an altcoin season but there's just SO MANY altcoins now and so many different narratives that it won't be as explosive as the last one. I hope I'm wrong of course!
We cant compare some of the past outcome on market price and cryptocurrency entire networks as of then to what we are having now, it more better and appropriate if we can deal which each stages base of the economic conditions on ground, even though there is more to expect from the market this season and beyond, any little challenges felt from the economic and financial circumstance may not by this time have much impact on the value of the cryptos as we had during the covid years back.
It would not matter for Bitcoin because regardless of the retail investors not having interest to invest as they did in 2021, the institutional investors are still going to pump the market to get high price as they can because they want to make profits from their investments and when Bitcoin is going up is the only way they can get the profits. They might not care too much about altcoins because alot of them are not focus on investing in altcoins but Bitcoin. Some exchanges are trying to push altcoins to the faces of institutional investors because they are listing as many of them but still they are not getting the attention. Only memecoins had a very bullish period but it did not last. Until Bitcoin has reduced in market dominance, there is no need to invest in any altcoins yet but to keep waiting.
as ridiculous as it sounds, most of retailer did exactly this like in the past bullrun cycle too, even the recent dips which caused bitcoin to touch $49k, there were so many retailers panicking and selling their coin at that price, which is kinda dumb in my honest opinion, if we're already going down so bad there's always bigger chance that the price could bounce back off and yet retailer doesn't seem to understand that.
this is why knowing basic of market could help massively in determining what step to take, the paper hand amateur trader will always be the one that become exit liquidity because they are just that bad. they should've stayed with DCA.
In reality, I believe that retail will be of little importance in this cycle. In the last cycle we started talking about institutional adoption, and it is true that it started then, but I think that when it is going to be noticed, when there is going to be real institutional adoption, it is going to be in this cycle. So, whether there are more or less retail investors, I think it will have little impact when compared to institutions buying (or selling) billions.
Retail investors like us may seem insignificant because we are a small entity, but if more people participate, it will not be as small as you think. In any financial market, retail investors are always in the majority, but we often hear about institutions because it is easier to aggregate their data than retail investors.
Also, as large institutions enter the market, it means they need more liquidity and without retail investors, where will they get liquidity? Why is it that when bull season comes, there will be many stories of investing in memes that make 1000%, 10000% profits? The sole purpose is to attract liquidity into the market and only retail investors like us care about that, institutions will never bother.
It will be hard to know when retail is in the market. Back in 2017 and 2021 tops, we could use the Apple Store or Play Store and watch when Coinbase was #1 on the App downloads. This time when it broke the ATH, Coinbase wasnt even close to being Top 10.
Even if people want to invest in Bitcoin, they wont do it on Coinbase or Binanace, they will just buy the ETFs. Sure we can see the flows but we dont know how much of those flows are from retail or from institutions, so there is no guage to find out when retail is active.
Times are changing and this cycle can be different.
But aren't the plebs like us also called "retail"?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But we're probably some of the "smarter" plebs/retail because we positioned ourselves during those bearish market cycles when Bitcoin was priced with a discount.
For OP's question of "when" actual retail arrives, that's probably going to be during the part of the cycle when the market's surge and its hype is in its peak level - perhaps 2026?
I think "retail" was quite active with memecoins in late 2023 and early 2024, and we may have seen a little pause since March/April (the Runes wave in April may have been the last phase where they were really "hot", although altcoins were already declining then).
The Active Addresses indicator is currently low, which could indicate low retail involvement at the moment. It's actually an interesting indicator to discuss, for example the indicator was historically correlated somewhat with price, but since 2023 it took a downward fall, see here. As the decline coincided with the Ordinals wave and in April near the halving the lowest point of this indicator was recorded, it is likely that this indicator is correlated negatively with fees ("higher fees, less active addresses"). It is recovering since the Runes frenzy was over, but very slowly. May be also a seasonal thing as July/August are the main holiday months in many countries in the Northern hemisphere.
However, where "retail" usually really shows up is in the last third or quarter or so of a bull market.
In addition, also "retailers" have access to Bitcoin ETFs in more countries now, most will be focused on the US spot ETF market even if they are in other countries; in addition some of the other ETFs (e.g. the european Jacobi ETF) being restricted to institutional investors. People who have already a securities account at a broker may chose to invest in an ETF instead of in Bitcoin.
PS: regarding
Monero had indeed a really good ROI in the last months. But that was not followed by most other altcoins, even Ethereum lost a lot of traction (despite the ETFs). And the reason for Monero's growth is that it was seriously undervalued after the Binance delisting, recovering slowly and steadily. Zoom out a bit and you'll see the whole picture
How about the retails pushing it in 2017 though? And as much as we have a lot of whales or we think of them as the one bringing the money, I think it is still us retail and average investors who are still going to pump the price.
And I think most of us are still in the market though, but perhaps waiting for the perfect time to put our saving in the market, just like in 2021. I also have the impressions that retail investors are smarter than average investor. And again, having that wait and feel strategy? it could really be a big swing next year 2025.