Bitcoin Price to Approach $5,000 then Crash

On Sunday, Jafari sent a note to Goldman Sachs clients updating her forecast. She anticipates that the bitcoin price will continue to rise to a maximum of $4,827 during its fifth wave.

Jafari is not the only analyst to forecast that bitcoin will approach the $5,000 mark. Max Keiser made that claim in June, and BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes recently told Business Insider that Segwit implementation puts $5,000 “within striking distance.” Stock researcher Ronnie Moas is even more bullish, predicting that the bitcoin price will surpass $7,500 by the end of 2017.

However, Jafari does not believe bitcoin will reach $5,000 during its fifth wave. In fact, she expects the bitcoin price to crash by more than 38% at the completion of the wave. As she told investors:

"Once a full five-wave sequence is in place, the market should in theory enter a corrective phase….This can last at least one-third of the time it took to complete the preceding advance and retrace at least 38.2 percent of the entire move."

This crash would reduce the value of bitcoin below $3,000. Jafari says bitcoin could correct down as far as $2,221, a level the market has not seen since the mid-July downtrend.

If the market does move as Jafari anticipates, investors should not panic. Even a drop to $2,221 would still give bitcoin a year-to-date increase of more than 130%. Despite claims to the contrary, bitcoin is not analogous to 17th-century Tulipmania in Holland, and the markets should experience an eventual recovery. After all, even Goldman Sachs has admitted that cryptocurrencies are “getting harder [for institutional investors] to ignore.”