Institutional Outflows From Bitcoin Paints Bearish Picture For Crypto Market

Institutional investors have been quite neutral on both bitcoin and the crypto market at large for a while now. This has translated into a mix of inflows and outflows into various digital assets, alternating with each passing week even through the bear market. However, current net flow records show that these large investors are beginning to find their chosen position in the market and it is in the camp of the bears.

Bitcoin Sees Outflows

Bitcoin had been recording minor inflows in the last month-and-a-half which had been good for the digital asset despite not having much of an impact. This has now changed completely as the figures for last week show $13 million in outflows for the digital asset.

This bearish sentiment has been more prominent in the short bitcoin that is now on to its third consecutive week of outflows. The $7.1 million brought the total outflows from short bitcoin to $28 million. These outflows show that large investors are pulling out of the market more instead of taking one side over the other, an overall bearish development.

The digital asset outflows for the week came out to $15.6 million during this time. Furthermore, it was a bearish start to the month of November with $19 million in outflows already. So even though November has been a historically bullish month for the crypto market, investors do not seem to believe this will be the case this time around.

Crypto market suffers general bearishness | Source: Crypto Total Market cap on TradingView.com

Reason For Bearishness

While it has not had as much of a profound effect as expected, the result of the FOMC meeting has been largely influencing the behaviors of investors in the market. The fourth consecutive interest rate hike by 75 bps showed that the Fed was nowhere close to backing down on its hawkish stance against the high inflation rates.

As expected, such high interest rates will have an effect on markets such as crypto, greatly limiting their ability to grow, especially during a bear market. It is also no surprise that the United States led the outflows for the week since the Fed decision has the most impact in the region.

Nevertheless, there were still some inflows from across the point. Both Switzerland and Germany saw inflows of $6.8 million and $4 million respectively, most of which were focused on altcoins. Ethereum finally put an end to its outflow trends with inflows of $2.7 million. XRP followed this trend with inflows of $1.1 million, marking its third week of inflows.

Since that time, the crypto market has taken a turn so it is expected that there might be a change in institutional investor sentiment in the coming week. However, the general crypto market sentiment continues to skew largely into the negative, which means no significant inflows should be expected. 

Featured image from BitIRA, chart from TradingView.com

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