23 years ago I walked onto the NYMEX floor at the old World Trade Centre. In my then, brief, 30 odd years of life I had never experienced sights, sounds or smells like it. As the market closed the scrum of bodies dissolved and the look of exhaustion, fear and in some cases desperation on the faces that turned towards me was haunting. I will never forget it.

Natural gas had just broken above $2 per MMBTU for the first time in history. That move heralded a secular change in the value of a commodity which had lain dormant since its price was deregulated a few years earlier. A few factors set the move in motion, largely a move from coal to gas fired power generation and domestic heating of a burgeoning number of new US homes. All amplified by a lack of winter storage. The reasons were probably unknown to the traders.

Natural was heading for $15.

Today we don't have an exchange floor in bitcoin or any other commodity. If we did then the faces at the end of play yesterday would have looked the same. Bitcoin exploded in price in the culmination of several days of increasing upward pressure. And then collapsed.

Who knows what led to the meteoric rise? My guess is the real driver is a resurgence of demand for bitcoin in China as one of the few non-Chinese related assets available to domestic investors ring-fenced in an otherwise weak-China world. Bitcoin offers one of the few alternative. The stories circulating about short term, bitcoin financed, ponzi schemes such as MMM are good cocktail party material but don't rise to plausible causality. The volume on Chinese exchanges has far outstripped any possibility of that.

We have maintained our 100% long position. Admittedly we did place some sell orders above $600 - though knowing my propensity for greed in bull markets I wonder if I might even have cancelled-when-close.

Things are quieter today and, like the changing of the seasons, all of a sudden $400 bitcoin looks cheap.

That's a price I only dreamt of a month ago.