Bitcoin’s Tuesday rebound from a five-day rout has drawn investors back to US stocks related to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
Pareteum Corp more than doubled after saying it would add blockchain support to its billing and settlement services, enabling it to process bitcoin, ether and litecoin.
Riot Blockchain Inc rose 20 percent, while LongFin Corp added 38 percent. Both had fallen more than 30 percent in the past four days as bitcoin plunged from a record.
Photo: Reuters
The biggest cryptocurrency rose 15 percent to US$15,998.50 at 3:09pm in New York.
Bitcoin’s more than 1,500 percent rally this year has prompted investors to snap up shares in companies often seen as a safer alternative to investing directly in the cryptocurrency itself. When the digital coin tumbled last week, the proxy stocks slumped as well.
Still, the trend that has seen investors pour into all things crypto became a frenzy, as obscure microcap companies reoriented to focus on some aspect of the craze, resulting in astronomical stock gains sparked simply by a name change.
The phenomenon reached a peak last week when Long Island Iced Tea Corp shares rose 238 percent after the company rebranded itself Long Blockchain Corp. The company’s stock fell 9.1 percent on Tuesday. It is still up more than 150 percent since the name change.
Bitcoin Investment Trust, a structured note that tracks the price of the digital token, jumped 22 percent. The publicly traded vehicle’s price exceeded the value of the bitcoin it holds by almost 100 percent three days ago.
On Track Innovations Ltd rose 8.7 percent, while Seven Stars Cloud Group added 10 percent and Digital Power Corp advanced 6.3 percent. Overstock.com Inc and Xunlei Ltd (迅雷) also gained.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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