Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: What happens to Crypto when normal stockmarket collapses??
by
tee-rex
on 04/09/2018, 14:23:04 UTC
HSBC sent an alert that there may be an imminent crash of stockmarket similar to 1987 Black Monday

https://www.rt.com/business/362618-stock-market-severe-fall/

If this happens again, what's everyones opinion on the effects on crypto? Would a bunch of burnt investors jump on board?

All these burnt investors will turn to T bills or gold. When the stock market collapses, risk aversion takes hold. People tend to sell risky assets and cryptocurrencies are definitely considered risky assets. So don’t be surprised if an equity crash is followed by a crypto crash.

Exactly, crypto is the king of speculative assets, zero inherent value. When the stock market tanks, crypto will tank right along with it, and more likely harder. The reason is the evaporation of economic confidence. When things begin to fall, people aren't going to have the confidence that this inherently worthless digital token is going to be valued higher by someone else in the future than what you bought it for. Stocks have inherent value; each share is worth the liquidation value of the company, which makes them vastly safer than crypto. Stock market crashes are about a flight to safety and reducing risk, so if money is fleeing far safer assets than crypto, logically I would expect money to flee the riskier assets quicker. That means away from crypto.

You seem to be familiar with stock and other markets, and yet it sounds rather strange that you call crypto the king of speculative assets. There are a lot of speculative instruments which have "zero inherent value" as well, like cash-settled futures, options, indexes, and whatnot, which are by far more speculative than crypto, especially if we use volatility as a metric measuring the speculative nature of an asset. Personally, I wouldn't even call a volatility index an asset even though you can earn piles of cash with it (as well as lose as much, for that matter).

Anyway, previously I also thought that a stock market crash would take crypto along with it. Now I'm not so sure after we have seen so dramatic fall of cryptocurrencies all on their own. It looks more like crypto is living its own life nowadays and not as much dependent on or linked to the stock market or any other market out there. Obviously, it is not like gold, which is "contrarian" (you know what I mean), but the "independence" level of crypto is quite on par with it these days.