Did Crypto’s crash or did they just have a bad hair day?

October 18 1987 goes down as the worst day in the US Stock Market when the S&P500 lost 22.6%. This was nearly twice the decline experienced in 1929’s ‘Great Crash’. The panic that followed occupied the financial pages for months.

On January 16, 2018, the CryptoCurrency CCI30 index of the 30 most traded currencies fell 22.9%. But as the following list of Reuter’s top news stories, the CryptoCrash did not even rate a mention.

So when is a crash not a crash? To put it in perspective, Crypto’s are volatile critters for reasons not worth mentioning here. For instance, in 1987 the daily standard deviation of return for the S&P500 was 1.1% whereas the daily standard deviation of the CryptoIndex is 4.5%. [Standard deviation is one way of quantifying the volatility of a risky security].

Put simply, Crypto’s are 4 times more volatile than stocks by this metric. This means that the 22% decline in Cryptos that occured last Monday only feels like a 5% fall in the US stock market – a bad hair day certainly but not worth jumping off a building over. A better way of thinking about it is that Cryptos would need to fall by 88% in one day for it to feel like Black Monday in October 1987 – a near total wipeout.

So punters, don’t expect to hear much about CryptoCrash in the newspapers until that market effectively disappears!