First Mover Asia: Markets in Wait-and-See Mode; Bitcoin Hovers Around $57K

Good morning. Here’s what’s happening this morning:

Market moves: Bitcoin moved little, while the “tether premium” dropped as Huobi’s deadline approaches.

Technician’s take: Long-term momentum is starting to fade, which could limit price gains this month. For now, BTC is holding support above $53K.

Catch the latest episodes of CoinDesk TV for insightful interviews with crypto industry leaders and analysis.

Bitcoin (BTC): $56,604 -1%

Ether (ETH): $4,536 -1.1%

S&P 500: $4,577 +1.4%

Dow Jones Industrial Average: $34,639 +1.8%

Nasdaq: $15,381 +0.8%

Gold: $1,768 +0.7%

Bitcoin remained around $57,000 on Thursday as the market remained in a wait-and-see mode. The oldest cryptocurrency’s daily trading volume on centralized exchanges also declined.

Data compiled by CoinDesk shows that bitcoin’s trading volume across 11 major centralized exchanges sank from a day ago and was much lower than a week ago. Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, fell slightly but remained in the $4,500-$4,600 range.

Meanwhile, the price for the USDT/CNY (tether/Chinese yuan) pair tumbled entering December,as the deadline approaches for Huobi, a popular crypto exchange among Chinese investors, to close the accounts of its existing users in mainland China. Amid China’s latest ban on crypto trading and mining, Huobi announced that it would remove all mainland Chinese accounts by the end of this year.

As a previous Asia First Mover mentioned, the market in China has been slowly rebounding from the country’s September crypto trading ban with tether’s quoted prices in the yuan on the over-the-counter (OTC) market recovering from a deep discount.

Under normal market conditions, the price of tether expressed in yuan should match that of the U.S. dollar’s exchange rate with the Asian currency, but tether had traded at a significant discount since China’s ban and turned into negative (as much as negative 5.31% yesterday) again after a brief recovery, according to data from feixiaohao.

Bitcoin Struggles Near Resistance; Support at $53K

Bitcoin (BTC) continues to stabilize above the $53,000 support level after last month’s decline.

There appears to be a stalemate, however, between buyers and sellers because the cryptocurrency is roughly flat over the past 24 hours. Resistance is seen around $60,000, which has capped upside moves over the past week.

BTC was trading around $56,000 at the time of publication and is down about 4% over the past week.

The short-term downtrend in BTC is defined by a series of lower price highs since Nov. 10, as seen in the chart above. Recently, oversold signals appeared on the charts, which could encourage short-term buying from the $53,00 support level. A decisive break above $60,000 would reverse the short-term downtrend.

Still, there is strong overhead resistance between $60,000 and $65,000, which could limit price gains this month.

8:30 a.m. HKT/SGT (12:30 a.m. UTC): Jibun bank services purchasing managers index (Nov.)

9:45 a.m. HKT/SGT (1:45 p.m. UTC): Caixin services purchasing managers index (Nov.)

3:45 p.m. HKT/SGT (7:45 a.m. UTC): France industrial output (Oct. MoM)

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In case you missed it, here are the most recent episodes of “First Mover” on CoinDesk TV:

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