“Once selloffs start driving price action, the market may move faster than actual demand would justify,” said Shawn Young, chief analyst at MEXC Research, who is watching bitcoin trade within the $60,000 to $63,000 band now that the first rally has occurred.
MSCI’s Asia Pacific stock gauge rose 1.4% as investors returned to semiconductor stocks on renewed optimism over AI demand, narrowing the week’s loss to less than 1%.
South Korea’s Kospi, a benchmark for AI investment, rose 4%. SK Hynix was among the winners after pricing $26.5 billion in American depositary shares, one of the biggest stock sales of the year.
Gains extended further as the yen strengthened 0.6% and long-term Japanese government bond yields fell after Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama said the government wants pension funds to increase their holdings of domestic assets. The Bloomberg dollar indicator is down and headed for a second consecutive weekly decline.
Nothing crypto moved bitcoin this week. There was no ETF flow of any size, no protocol event or exchange failure. Bitcoin absorbed an oil crisis, a global bond sell-off, an aggressive reassessment of Federal Reserve expectations and two rounds of US attacks on Iran, and ended up 4.2% because Korean memory chips are in demand and the dollar is losing ground.
