To give you an image of how often Bitcoin’s intraday price is out of whack, I’ve pieced together this simple Javascript tool that annotates every 1-minute candle that’s longer than 5 standard deviations, or “sigmas”.
It’s a small follow-up to my last piece, “Price Moves Show Bitcoin Is A Penny Stock“. It’s dynamic, too, so you can come back whenever you like a re-check what’s going on.
What this does is get the last 1440 1-minute candles for Bitcoin from CryptoCompare, compute the standard deviation of price moves over the last 24 hours, and annotate every candle that, basically, should not happen. A special mention to CanvasJS for the charting tool (full disclaimer: I don’t have a licence, as soon as this blog hits 100k views/month and I swim in dough for shilling shitcoins, I’ll buy one, promise).
The annotations go like this:
> 7σ : “Wow”
> 9σ : “Awesome”
> 11σ : “Outstanding”
> 13σ : “Unbelievable”
> 15σ : “Out of this world”
> 17σ : “Are you kidding me?”
> 19σ : “This is ridiculous!”
For context, outside of unexpected, breaking news, a blue-chip stock like IBM experiences 1-minute candles measuring above 7 standard deviations only once per month.
Look at the chart above, and try to figure out what kind of news produced every “abnormal” price move. Good luck.