Bitcoin’s Wild Ride: $104,000 Price Leaves Bears Broke, Bulls Breakdancing

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What to know:

  • Bitcoin moonwalked past $102,500, liquidating $400 million in “sensible” bets against it.
  • This sprint appears to have eaten a whole English breakfast, courtesy of a new U.K. trade deal and ETF inflows fatter than the Patrician’s purse (over $40 billion!).

Picture the scene: traders blinking at their screens, frantically sipping coffee that has absolutely no hope of steadying their nerves. Bitcoin, which is not a physical coin but does a decent impression of one on the internet, leaps upward over 3% in a day, waving cheekily from $102,500 and winking at $104,000 because why not? (It’s been ages since January.)

Star of the show? President Donald Trump, who apparently can sign trade deals faster than a Discworld bureaucrat can stamp paperwork. Investors, seeing ETF inflows that look suspiciously like floodwaters—upwards of $40 billion—clambered into the bullish lifeboat.

Meanwhile, the rest of the market got swept up in the excitement, dragging the total market cap of, well, everything-not-Bitcoin up by 10% to a properly eye-watering $1.14 trillion. Some would say that’s a lot of money. Others would say you can’t have too many zeros. The latter are presumably wizards, auditors, or both.

And so, like panicked pensioners in a supermarket sale, short traders were trampled by the rising price—$400 million in liquidations. That’s the largest single-day bear buffet since, oh, at least November. For the sake of narrative balance, $22 million in optimistic long positions were also wiped out, possibly by traders who thought Bitcoin would behave itself. (Spoiler: it did not. 🎢)

With all this forced closing of shorts, the market is now about as unbalanced as a three-legged stool at an Ankh-Morpork pub. Bulls are eyeing fresh gains; bears are eyeing the exits. Stay tuned, because if history’s taught us anything, it’s that markets never, ever go back down. 😉

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2025-05-09 07:46