Bitcoin’s market cap vaulted by $100 billion overnight from $1.4 trillion to almost $1.5 trillion on enthusiasm over the election of the pro-crypto Republican candidate Donald Trump to US president. At one point, bitcoin’s price reached a new all-time high of $75,359, before settling in recently at $74,580.
The sharp upswing has prompted debate among traders and investors about whether to take profits or see if the momentum from Trump’s victory can extend even further.
VanEck’s head of digital assets research Matthew Sigel was firm in his belief that bitcoin’s current run has room to go. “We don’t think anybody should take profits here unless they need the money to eat or shelter themselves,” Sigel told Unchained via X.
Seth Ginns, managing partner and head of liquid investments at CoinFund, agreed strongly with Sigel. “We’re very positive on the outlook for bitcoin from here, as one of the Trump campaign’s core policy points has been the establishment of a US bitcoin strategic reserve. We expect that to catalyze other countries to do the same,” Ginns wrote in an email to Unchained. At the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville in July, Trump pledged to hold on to the more than 200,000 bitcoin seized by the US government over the years to create a strategic reserve of the cryptocurrency.
Ginns further noted that he thought bitcoin’s price momentum in this case was a good thing to ride. “We’re also breaking into all-time-high territory, which in the past cycle led to fast and material price appreciation, and that was before we had bitcoin ETFs expanding access,” Ginns said.
Others argue, however, that bitcoin’s recent spike—it has increased 7.2% in the last 24 hours and 14% in the last week—means that investors should definitely consider taking some profits off the table.
“[Bitcoin’s price] could go up +30-40% from here, but not like the +368% we saw from $16K,” wrote CryptoQuant founder and CEO Ki Young Ju on X on Wednesday morning. “Time to consider gradual selling, not all-in buying, imo.”
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Jim Hwang, the COO of Firinne Capital, said that the decision of whether to take profits on bitcoin holdings or let them ride and even acquire more bitcoin depended on the specific investor’s time horizon.
“In terms of whether [now] is a good time to buy… for short-term (few days, a week +) traders looking for quick gains, I would say no,” Hwang said.
Lastly, Julio Moreno, CryptoQuant’s head of research, argued that despite bitcoin’s price reaching a new all-time high, the asset did not appear to be overvalued. He based this assessment on the Market Value to Realized Value (MVRV) ratio, which compares the market value of an asset to the average purchase price of its holders over a given amount of time.
According to Moreno, BTC’s current price of $74,264 is still close to the average cost of traders who acquired BTC in the last one to three months. To him, this means that the cryptocurrency “is not overheated.”
