Bitcoin pushes past $47,000 to new record highs – business live

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Bitcoin enthusiasts are celebrating a fresh jump in the cryptocurrency’s value. It rose further overnight after an initial surge on Monday, when Tesla disclosed its own $1.5m investment in bitcoin and said it is likely to start accepting it as payment for its cars in the future.

Bitcoin is now comfortably trading above $47,000, and briefly hit $48,000 this morning, marking a new record high. It is now trading around $47,700.

Some analysts are now patiently waiting for the next big push above $50,000, which could be driven by other major companies looking for alternative assets that can compensate for persistently low interest rates.

Naeem Aslam, chief market analyst at AvaTrade says Tesla’s bitcoin investment may be the start of a wider corporate trend.

Companies are holding big cash piles in their bank account, which is not earning them much at all. These cash rich companies do not know what they should do with their cash. Hence a new trend could be emerging, which has been put in motion by Tesla.

It is true that Tesla’s investment in Bitcoin is tiny compared to its market cap or its balance sheet. But the important point to pay attention to here is if other cash rich companies like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook also begin to invest their cash in Bitcoin as an alternative investment.

Even less than one percent of their cash in Bitcoin is going to be a huge amount. If this strategy becomes the main street, we could see some serious cash purchasing Bitcoin, and that can knock the supply equation out of its place—after all, there is only a limited supply of Bitcoin.

In stock markets, Wall Street closed at new all-time highs on Monday, with the Nasdaq ending higher by nearly 1% and the Dow and S&P 500 up by around 0.75%.

But Asian stocks have been mixed, with Australia’s ASX down 1.2%, the Shanghai Composite rising by 2% and Japan’s Nikkei up around 0.4%.

In the absence of any major events today, European stocks are expected to open in flat-to-negative territory at the start of trading:

The agenda

• 9am GMT: Italian industrial production (December)
• 11am GMT: US NFIB small business optimism index