Today’s currency price, January 4: Bitcoin suddenly plummeted below $41,000, and altcoins and Wall Street were on fire

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Bitcoin fell nearly 10% last night, falling below $41,000 as concerns about the Bitcoin ETF spot emerged.

BTC Price Chart – 4 Hours | Source: TradingView

US stocks

The Nasdaq Composite Index fell for a second consecutive trading day since the New Year, its biggest drop in nearly three months.

At the close of trading on January 3, the Nasdaq Composite Index fell 1.18% to 14592.21 points, recording declines for four consecutive trading days. The S&P 500 fell 0.8% to 4,704.81 points, and the Dow Jones fell 284.85 points (equivalent to 0.76%) to 37,430.19 points.

The Nasdaq Composite had its worst trading day since October 2023, hammered by big tech stocks and Apple shares falling nearly 4% after Barclays downgraded its recommendation on the iPhone maker. Apple shares fell another 0.8% on Wednesday.

Other technology stocks including Nvidia, Tesla and Meta posted losses on Wednesday. The decline also came as the 10-year U.S. government bond yield rose above the important milestone of 4%.

Investors appear to be selling off technology stocks that surged last year amid forecasts of monetary policy easing in 2024. However, investors appear to have tempered their enthusiasm amid uncertainty over the timing of a rate cut by the Federal Reserve.

“Long term, I remain very bullish,” said Steve Eisman, senior portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman. But in the short term, I’m just worried about people going into the new year in too good a mood. “

Major stock indexes were also under pressure Wednesday afternoon after the release of minutes from the Federal Reserve’s latest meeting, which suggested the central bank was not yet ready to cut interest rates.

The minutes of the meeting clearly stated, “Participants emphasized the importance of maintaining a cautious and data-reliant attitude when making monetary policy decisions and reiterated that tightening policy will continue for a period until inflation falls significantly back to the Committee’s objective.”

However, Fed officials said they expect to cut interest rates by 0.75 percentage points at some point this year, although the timing of the cut remains uncertain.

Markets have had a fantastic year, with all major stock indexes recovering from a dismal 2022. The S&P 500 rose more than 24% to end 2023 on its longest winning streak since 2004, while the Nasdaq Composite rose 43% for its best year since 2020.

Gold prices fell on Wednesday (January 3), recording their strongest percentage decline in more than three weeks, after minutes of the Federal Reserve’s latest policy meeting showed uncertainty about the timing of an interest rate cut.

At the close of trading on January 3, the spot gold contract fell 1% to US$2,037.61 per ounce, the lowest level in the past two weeks and the largest drop since December 11, 2023. Gold futures contracts fell 1.5% to $2,042.8 an ounce.

Oil prices rose more than 3% on Wednesday (January 3) as the United States warned that the Houthis would launch further attacks in the Red Sea and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) pledged to continue to unite to support oil prices.

Reuters reported on Wednesday that protests in Libya also led to the closure of the 300,000 barrels per day Sharara oil field.

As of late trading, the WTI crude oil contract rose by $2.32 (equivalent to 3.29%) to $72.7 per barrel. The Brent crude oil contract rose by $2.36 (equivalent to 3.11%) to $78.25 per barrel.

Bitcoin and altcoins

Bitcoin fell from around $45,000 to a local bottom of $40,750 last night, coinciding with an announcement from Singapore-based digital asset firm Matrixport over the same period. Report Markus Thielen writes, predicting that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will reject all spot Bitcoin ETF applications.

However, Matrixport co-founder Jihan Wu said the report was unlikely to cause a crash, noting that the weakness in crypto-related stocks over the past few days could signal further decline for digital assets.

Additionally, analysts dismissed Matrixport’s claims, saying there was no evidence regulators would reject the application and gave a higher chance of approval.

Bitcoin price has since recovered to around $42,800, where it has stabilized so far but has still lost more than 5% of its value in the past 24 hours.

BTC Price Chart – 1 Day | Source: TradingView

The altcoin market was on fire yesterday, with many large-cap projects recording double-digit losses.

Conflux (CFX), Theta Network (THETA), Terra Classic (LUNC), SATS (1000SATS), Bonk (BONK), MultiversX (EGLD), Gala (GALA), Filecoin (FIL), Bitcoin SV (BSV), The Sandbox (SAND), Fantom (FTM), IOTA (IOTA), Polygon (MATIC), Decentraland (MANA), WOO Network (WOO), Flow (FLOW), FTX Token (FTT), Arweave (AR), EOS (EOS ), Kava (KAVA), Kaspa (KAS), Aptos (APT), Neo (NEO), Axie Infinity (AXS), Pancakeswap (CAKE), Synthetix (SNX), Uniswap (UNI), ORDI (ORDI), Rai Bitcoin (LTC), Hedera (HBAR), Dogecoin (DOGE), The Graph (GRT)… have all lost more than 10% of their value in the past 24 hours.