The silence of the shorts BTCUSDOne can visualize the pain and carnage of the traders that were short Bitcoin going into this move. While neither the amount of short interest nor the percentages long/short were at record levels they were definitely high and had been increasing steadily since the dump in March. If anything it was a great reason to be contrarian as the shorts steadily increased over the last month.
Even though I would normally like to take a short off a 50% price retracement my rules and conditions were not met for a trade. Nor were they met for a margin long. I must be content with the 1x move.
I also took the time this morning to check the arbitrage between the spot BTCUSD and futures markets. The highest futures premium for the September 2020 futures was only 0.4%. That tells me that there is not a tremendous amount of bullish optimism within this move. When we were at this same price level in mid January the upside premium was over 4%.
The futures premium being low and the apparent liquidation of short interest tells me that this move was more of a 'short squeeze' of traders trying to play that 50% retracement as a resistance closing or being force closed (most likely) their positions.
XBTM20
XBTZ19 Data Capture, 6 months of Bitcoin Futures dataIn my experience Tradingview does not keep data of expired Bitmex contracts after expiration. The primary purpose of this post is to keep the valuable data from XBTZ19 contract from being lost forever. My indicator script XBT Contango Calculator Version 3 is used in this example to capture all the data from the December Futures contract. This post should be a historical record of how backwardation and contango affected price action during the last 6 months. I will do this post at each expiration, primarily for my own benefit and analysis, but also as a record other traders in the community can look back on. Please also see below "Links to related Ideas"