There may be no better proxy for broad risk appetites right now than the price of Bitcoin. Gold is up 11% year-to-date; the S&P 500 is up 18%; the Nasdaq 100 is up a lofty 32%, but Bitcoin leaves them all in the dust. The cryptocurrency has climbed 900% so far during 2017.
Predictably, this stellar performance has pulled in a massive amount of speculators hoping to find the path to easy riches. How do we know that so many folks have now jumped aboard the crypto express? Well, it’s difficult to quantify but Google trends tells us that “Bitcoin,” as a search term, is now more popular than “Beyonce,” “Taylor Swift” and “Kim Kardashian” combined – and by a wide margin.
