Mark Dow, a former International Monetary Fund economist who manages a family office in Southern California, has closed his short position on Bitcoin almost a year after opening it at the height of the crypto’s meteoric rise.
“I’m done. I don’t want to try to ride this thing to zero,” – Dow said in a phone interview to Bloomberg on Tuesday. – “I don’t want to try to squeeze more out of the lemon. I don’t want to think about it. It seemed like the right time.”
Dow bet that Bitcoin would decline in value right after Bitcoin futures began trading, pushing the price to a high of $19,511 exactly one year ago. Dow took profits twice already this year, he said.
According to Dow, the 2017 run-up in Bitcoin’s price can partly be attributed to the fact that many people didn’t understand the currency or its underlying technology.
“They just saw it was going up and wanted a piece of it. People’s imaginations can run further when they’re not tethered to facts, when they don’t understand the issue,” -he said. – “It allowed the bubble to be much larger and much more violent. I saw the psychological hallmarks of it and there came a point where it looked like the fever was breaking.”
At press time, Bitcoin is trading at $3 746,93 (6,48%), according to CoinMarketCap.
