There are at least three very good reasons you should consider buying Bitcoin this weekend. And one reason you should tread carefully.

(This is not financial advice and you should always do your own research and tread carefully. The markets are volatile at the moment and BTC plunged $1000 in 90 minutes Friday morning.)

The first reason to consider buying Bitcoin is pretty simple: on Friday Tether printed up a fresh batch of $100 million worth of the infamous stablecoin.

They were minted on the Ethereum blockchain, bringing the total USDT supply on Eth to $1.1 billion.

Now, you don’t need to be a USDT conspiracy theorist, to notice a correlation between USDT prints and the Bitcoin price.

Bitcoin price seems to move in tandem with USDT

Each new printing of Tether appears to drive up the Bitcoin price further and the withdrawal of Tether appears to coincide with a price drop.

When $300 million of Tether was pulled from the market in November 2018, the price plummeted below $6000. When $300 million of Tether was added a couple of months ago, the price shot up.

Tether’s monthly volume surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in June according to CoinGecko data, and in the same month, the price of BTC increased by 50%.

Bitcoin/USDT Theory #1

There are two main schools of thoughts about this:

The first is that Tether is manipulating the market. That’s an increasingly popular conclusion advanced everywhere from the Financial Times to Decrypt.

Research from the University of Texas last year stated: “Using algorithms to analyze the blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices.

Bitcoin/USDT Theory #2

The other, more reassuring theory, is that Tether reflects actual demand.

That’s what Kraken CEO Jess Powell told the TD Ameritrade Network earlier this week.

“I don’t have inside knowledge of what’s happening at Tether, but I can tell you that, historically, when you’ve seen growth in the supply of Tether, we’ve seen growth in

the supply of U.S. dollars coming onto Kraken. And other exchanges would report the same,” he said.

“Whenever new Tethers get printed, 99 percent of times there are tons of US dollars that are coming into exchanges. It does not get represented like Tethers on a blockchain. I believe Tether prints are a result of new fiat coming in.”

Either way, many people seem to thinks there’s some association, so it’s probably worth at least considering timing your buys around the injection of new Tether.

The latest surge in #bitcoin has been accompanied by big volume in #tether. Watch as @krakenfx CEO @jespow details to @OJRenick why the controversy over the stablecoin is much ado about nothing.$BTC $USDT — TD Ameritrade Network (@TDANetwork) July 1, 2019

Bitcoin technical indicators predict new ATH (apparently)

The second reason to buy Bitcoin relates to technical indicators.

According to CoinRivet’s analysis today:

“The daily stochastics have now crossed to the upside – the last time this happened was on June 11, when Bitcoin was at $8,000 before a rally to $14,000.

“The cross before this came on April 30, with Bitcoin rallying all the way from $5,300 to $8,500 in the following two weeks. Both crosses proceeded a 65% and an 80% move to the upside, adding weight to today’s cross.”

If this analysis is correct (and there are plenty of other predictions), that would pump the price to a new all-time high above $20,000.

Weekends see a lot more Bitcoin price action

The third reason to consider a Bitcoin purchase is that crypto markets are notoriously more volatile on weekends.

Over the past couple of months, more than 40% of Bitcoin’s price gains happened on weekends and the coin reached its all-time high on a Saturday in December 2017.

Bloomberg attributes the weekend price action in part to the tendency of major projects to release news on a Monday which sees traders buying the rumour to speculate on price gains.

However, the bigger factor is a drop in the number of traders, which results in bigger price moves.

“The fact that these markets are operating when the banks are closed leads to price movements being exacerbated. It also takes a lot less to move the needle when everyone’s sleeping or it’s the weekend,” said Montreal-based Jonathan Zeppettini, international operations lead at Decred, a digital currency.

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mike McGlone agreed, adding that he believed it was “more sophisticated traders picking time and paths of least resistance to profit”

One good reason not to buy BTC

As always there’s one good reason not to buy Bitcoin.

The crypto markets are unpredictable and volatile – and plunged $1000 Friday morning in just 90 minutes.

Despite the encouraging signs above, they could easily drop 20% tomorrow.

So never invest more money than you can afford to lose.