Bitcoin price weekly analysis: BTC gets hammered in a tough week

While the price of bitcoin has taken a beating over the last week, there are signs of recovery.
Key takeaways
- Prices get hammered after a tough weekend
- US$8,400 is the new black as support for US$9,000 seems a long way off
- Market cap down by about US$11 billion across the week
Last week, I wrote that bitcoin was having a pricing correction after a couple of strong weeks of trading. Well, that correction went from small to significant.
This time last week, bitcoin was trading between US$9,300 and US$9,400. And it stayed there until Tuesday when the price dipped by around US$200 before recovering to where it started on Monday. Then over the weekend, all hell broke loose with bitcoin suffering a dip down to around US$8250 – a fall of around 11% over about 24 hours.

Image: CoinMarketCap
The price recovered slightly to around US$8,660 on Saturday night before another drop and rise to around US$8,700 where it sits at the time of writing.
Unsurprisingly, that collapse in the price was accompanied by strong trading volumes, presumably as profit taking after the last couple of weeks took hold. Traders who bought into bitcoin in the last week or so of April had some solid returns before the sell-off on Saturday night.
Some analysis from News BTC suggests that breaking through the US$9,000 barrier will be a challenge and will meet some resistance. FXStreet's look at the BTC market concurs and said it will take a brave face for bulls to come out and push the price up to US$9,000 any time soon.
Cryptopotato looks at the current price in the context of the MA200 – the 200-day moving average. The MA200 is sitting in the US$8,500 to US$8,600 range, so the lows we saw over the weekend are outside that range.
One other thing that may influence things is the Consensus conference, which is happening in New York this week. Cryptopotato notes that the last three events have been followed by strong, positive price movements.
Perhaps the best laugh I've had are two speculative analyses, published by the same author at Smartereum. In one, Andreas Kaplan speculates that bitcoin could reach US$29,500 by the end of 2018 while in another, published on the same day, he asks if bitcoin can hit US$100,000 this year.
Which one is right?
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author holds XLM, BTC, EOS, NEO, ETH and XRP.
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