Quote from: T.Stuart on January 09, 2014, 10:14:19 PM

Quote from: oda.krell on January 09, 2014, 10:13:08 PM

Good call, arepo. Let's see what the next days bring.

Ignore the people who think it all reduces to news. News matters, but not in the way they think it does.

I don't think it all reduces to news at all. If you have a minute or two please explain briefly how it matters in the way you think it does. I would be very grateful for the insight!

Here's my view of it: Intuitively, one might think that some particular news item x has a clear, maybe obvious effect on price. If you read for example the wall thread, it's pretty clear that's a rather popular idea there. In reality however, while news affects price, the question of *how* and *how much* some news item affects price is not set in stone, but rather dependent on how it is *interpreted*.

So the same news item, in two different market situations, could lead to drastically different results. Example: the SR takedown. Imagine asking on the wall thread a week or two before it happened how price would react if SR is being taken down by the FBI. I'm quite sure the intuitive answer would have been "terrible crash". And during the first few hours after the news, that was indeed the reaction. But then we discovered support, probably because of built up buying pressure, partly also because China had began to enter the game, and people started realizing that maybe it's not all that bad for BTC to cut its ties with the criminal market (not that it really did, but that what it looks like to the outside). And suddenly: huge rally.

So I can't speak for the others, since I'm taking a sort of middle position: news matter, but *how* they matter is heavily context dependent. And while I don't think *any* news can trigger any price action, often enough the market is in such a state that many different types of news can trigger the same price response.

Applied to today: I don't think, for example, that if the news of today would have been "US government outlaws Bitcoin" we would have seen the mild recovery we've seen. In that sense, it did in fact help that overstock made the announcement. But on a different day, the same announcement would have only caused a weak "so what?". So in that sense, it wasn't overstock that somehow caused the trend out of nowhere.

(Bit of a rambling post, sorry. Too lazy to rewrite it Tongue

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