One of the big upcoming news in the financial world this week is the public listing of Alibaba subsidiary company, Ant Group, on the Hong Kong and Shanghai Stock Exchanges on November 5. The fintech giant is likely to conduct the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history, expecting to raise $34.4 billion which eclipses that of the Saudi Aramco $29.4 billion IPO last year.
To put this into perspective, Ant Group owns Alipay, one of the largest payment platforms in the world. The transaction value of Alipay in the past year topped at $17.6 trillion, surpassing global credit card behemoths like Visa and Mastercard, which clocked in at $11.3 trillion and $6.3 trillion respectively.
Apart from Alipay, the Chinese fintech juggernaut is also stretching its arm into insurance and lending services. Currently, out of China’s population of 1.4 billion people, more than 500 million are customers using Ant’s lending services.
The IPO will likely push the valuation of Ant Group to surpass $313 billion. This means that it will be the fourth largest financial company in the world, exceeding Goldman Sachs and ICBC, the China’s largest bank.
How this will affect the fintech and blockchain space? The surplus capital raised from the IPO will flow into other development and research projects and this is very much likely to include digital assets and currencies as the industry is gaining more and more momentum. Moreover, as the PBoC conducted a pilot testing period for its digital yuan, Alipay will definitely get tangled into this digital currency arms race one way or another.
Even though trading cryptocurrency remains illegal in China, Ant Group’s customer base is even larger than that of PayPal’s. Its involvement in the digital asset realm will push for mass adoption at a scale that PayPal cannot even dream to achieve.
Bitcoin Technical Analysis
Bitcoin (BTC) has reached another crossroad at $14,000 which has proven to be a strong resistance. Looking at the chart below, we can see that BTC beautifully broke above the suppressing trendline and came back for a retest to confirm support at $10K.
Rising above $14K level, however, is expected to be a large void all the way to the all-time high (ATH) at $20K since there were very little trading activities ever happened in the area.
In case of a pull back, however, Bitcoin should not lose $12,500 as it is deemed a point of the previous bullish breakout. Falling any lower will put BTC back into another sideway consolidation period.
Read more: Bitcoin Closes the Second Highest Monthly Candle Ever
Ethereum Technical Analysis
Ethereum (ETH) in the previous week got rejected by the top of the symmetrical triangle but managed to hold its ground and avoided creating a lower low. At the moment Ethereum is still being compressed into the tip of the triangle and should not in any case break below the bottom channel.
To confirm a bullish uptrend in the short term, ETH must break out from the triangle pattern and create a higher high above $422. Next target in the midterm will be at $450 and $490 which are the Fibonacci’s resistance and previous top created in late August.
The breakout from the symmetrical triangle for Ethereum should happen within a couple of weeks. The direction of breakout should determine the overall trend of ETH until the end of 2020.
Disclaimer: This analysis is the view of the author’s alone, and does not in any way represent trading advice. all traders should trade at their own risk.
You may also want to read: Coinbase vs. PayPal in the US – Who Will Emerge The Winner?
