It’s not the middle of January yet but the events we are so eager to tell you about are numerous. We’re definitely not going to deny ourselves the pleasure, so let’s get started.
1. Bitcoin set a new record

On January 8th, the Bitcoin price reached the new all-time high – 40599.3 USD per coin. Since the beginning of the year, the first cryptocurrency has grown by 40.24% or 11649.9 USD.

Traders that expected the BTC to fall playing short lost almost 800 million USD in just 24 hours. However, note that the record price didn’t last long: after January 8th, the rate started declining; by the time this article was being written, it had lost 12.7%, reaching 33340.8 USD.

At the beginning of January, JPMorgan analysts forecast that in the long run, the BTC would reach 146 thousand USD per coin. Their conclusion is based on the actual statistics that show an outflow of investments from gold reaching 7 billion USD while the inflow of investments in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust reaching 3 billion USD.

Catherine Coley, the head of the Binance US department, voiced an opinion that by the end of the year the BTC would have reached 100 thousand USD.

As for Sonny Singh, the marketing director of the Bitpay crypto payment system, he warns of a steep decline of the BTC back to 20 thousand USD. He states that institutional investors might start a super-scale sale at any moment.
2. Elon Musk became the richest person in the world

On January 8th, Tesla quotations leaped by almost 8%, reaching 880 USD per stock, which event reshuffled the list of the world’s richest people. Now the fira+96st line is occupied by Elon Musk, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes at 189.7 billion USD.

This swift growth is explained by the stable production and sales performance: last year, regardless of the COVID-19 pandemics and the overall economic decay, Tesla produced 509.7 thousand and sold 499.9 thousand electric cars.

Note that in 2020, mister Musk, with his 27 billion USD of fortune, hardly entered the top-50 of the world’s richest people. And now he managed to overshadow Jeff Bezos, who had been number one since 2017. According to Forbes, today the fortune of Amazon's founder reaches 185.7 billion USD.
3. Brent stepped over 55 USD first time in 11 months

On January 8th – yes, we’ve also noted that it was a fruitful day – the price of a March future for Brent oil grew by 2.96%, reaching 55.99 USD. Last time the price of a Brent barrel was over 55 USD on February 25th, 2020.

The growth of the quotations is explained by the recent OPEC+ agreement. Let us remind you that on January 5th, the member countries agreed on keeping the production volume in February and March-2021 at the January level of 22.1 million barrels a day.

According to this latest agreement, in February-March, Russia and Kazakhstan will be allowed to increase the production volume by 10 thousand and 65 thousand barrels a day, respectively. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia will reduce its production volume by 1 million barrels a day.
Summing up

We’ve presented you with the top-3 cheerful events of 2021. Clearly, there’s been much more than just that but we’ve picked up the most interesting ones: the new record of the BTC price, the new richest person in the world, the growth of the oil price.

If you think we’ve let something out unfairly, please make sure to let us know in the comments below: we’ll try to discuss them in our next articles.


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Pandemic, quarantine, vaccines, the growth of the IT sector, antitrust litigation of technology corporations, the explosive success of Tesla, and, of course, Brexit - these are our most significant events of the year.
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This new week of January is unlikely to be eventful: the market has just got a whole load of news and is busy analyzing it. Oil is pricey, the risk seems appealing, and the nearest future does not look complicated.