Options used to be close to irrelevant for bitcoin's price.

Until now.

At current price levels, hedging large option notionals has a major impact on price.

Here's a quick thread on options 👇

Let's start with the meaning of delta.

Delta is the rate of change of an option's price relative to a change in the price of its underlying.

For example, the price of a 50 delta option will move 50% as much as the underlying.

For practical purposes, think of it as how much of the underlying you have:

- if long 50 delta call on 1 BTC => long 0.5 BTC
- if long 50 delta put on 1 BTC => short 0.5 BTC
- if short 50 delta call on 1 BTC => short 0.5 BTC
- if short 50 delta put on 1 BTC => long 0.5 BTC

An option where the option's strike (i.e. exercise price) is equal to current spot price is known as an at-the-money option (ATM). ATM options have a delta of 50, while deep in the money options have a delta of close to 100.

Can also think of delta as probability. A 50 delta option has a 50% chance of expiring in the money.

For a call, the higher price goes => the more in the money the call => the higher the delta.

Once delta gets close to 100, odds are ~100% the option will expire in the money.

1/ The #Bitcoin bear case has two two components:

The macro, and the miners.

THREAD 👇

2/ On the macro side, if the dollar reverses its major downtrend and/or real rates turn positive, that will hurt $BTC considerably.

I don't expect either to happen in 2021, but have to pay attention to these.

3/ On the miners side, one has to consider the miners' cycle.

It works like this 👇

4/ Miners' hashrate (the aggregated bitcoin computing capacity) is directly tied to mining difficulty, which is the main variable in the bitcoin cost of production

=> the more capacity installed, the higher the difficulty, and the higher the cost.

5/ In a bull-run, miners' hashrate lags price, so as price takes off and moves higher, miners' profitability explodes (as price goes up but production costs don't as much).

These are the happy times.

Crypto, a new asset class - quite a comprehensive report by Goldman.

Crypto

Bitcoin

2013-2016 sv 2017-2021

If I read that report and were a nocoiner, I'd go look at the charts, recognize this as a great entry point, and go shopping. Granted, I'm not a dinosaur.