Bitcoin slides 14% in a week to $65,000 as weekend selling breaks Friday's low
Bitcoin fell about 14% over the past week to trade near $65,100 on Saturday, breaking below Friday's low of about $67,555 and touching its weakest level since mid-August, according to Bitcoin Magazine Pro data. A week earlier, on November 7, it was changing hands near $75,750.
The slide gathered pace after Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday, a shake-up that triggered a selloff in AI stocks and coincided with bitcoin slipping below $72,000. It fell toward $71,000 by Thursday evening and dropped to about $67,555 around midnight Eastern on Friday before a brief recovery toward $69,800. Selling resumed on Friday evening and carried into the mid-$66,000s, with a further leg down after 8am ET on Saturday taking out Friday's trough.
Macro pressure did the rest. The Labor Department said the Producer Price Index for final demand rose 0.3% in October, short of the 0.4% economists expected, though the unadjusted index was up 6.5% year on year, the largest 12-month rise since November 2022. The 10-year Treasury yield climbed as high as 5.17% on Friday, a four-week high, and the dollar index held at a 19-month high. Boston Fed President Susan Collins said "soon, some additional tightening of Fed monetary policy may be appropriate," while San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said policymakers will, "in all likelihood, raise interest rates." CME FedWatch data show traders fully pricing a quarter-point hike at the December 8-9 meeting.
Demand from spot bitcoin ETFs has not filled the gap. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust bled $2 billion over nine straight days of outflows through Wednesday, and the funds posted a sixth straight day of net outflows on Thursday. Weekend trading is typically thinner, leaving the price more exposed to sharp swings.
Miners got some relief: bitcoin's mining difficulty dropped 9.13% at 12:02am ET on Saturday at block 975,744, falling from about 148.36 trillion to 134.82 trillion, the largest cut since June. Attention now turns to whether Saturday's slide holds below Friday's low and to Nvidia's third-quarter results on Tuesday, the first since Huang stepped down, under interim CEO Colette Kress.
