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A Standard Chartered analyst who predicted bitcoin hitting $120,000 by the second quarter now says his price call is “too low.”
“I apologise that my USD120k Q2 target may be too low,” Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital assets at Standard Chartered, said in a tongue-in-cheek comment shared with clients via email Thursday.
Last month, Kendrick wrote a note saying that he expects bitcoin to reach an all-time high of around $120,000 in the second quarter of 2025 on the back of a “strategic asset reallocation away from US assets” and “accumulation by ‘whales’ (major holders).”
“We expect these supportive factors to push BTC to a fresh all-time high around USD 120,000 in Q2,” Kendrick said at the time. “We see gains continuing through the summer, taking BTC-USD towards our year-end forecast of 200,000.”
On Thursday, Kendrick said his $120,000 bitcoin price call now “looks very achievable” and that this may even be too low a target.
“The dominant story for Bitcoin has changed again,” the Standard Chartered analyst said. “It was correlation to risk assets … It then became a way to position for strategic asset reallocation out of US assets.”
“It is now all about flows. And flows are coming in many forms,” he added.
His comments come as bitcoin once again approaches the $100,000 level. The price of the cryptocurrency was last seen trading up by more than 3% at $99,293.54, according to Coin Metrics. Earlier, it rose as high as $99,897.00.
In recent years, analysts have picked up on a pattern that shows bitcoin trading in a similar way to risk assets such as U.S. technology stocks — the rationale being that increased inflows of more institutional capital into bitcoin makes it more prone to the same market risks equity markets face.
Kendrick — who has long held a bullish position on the cryptocurrency — said that U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds have seen $5.3 billion of inflows in the past three weeks, suggesting more institutional money is piling in.
He pointed to several examples of large investors allocating part of their portfolios to bitcoin, including software firm MicroStrategy ramping up bitcoin purchases, the Abu Dhbai sovereign wealth fund holding BlackRock’s IBIT bitcoin ETF, and the Swiss National Bank buying shares of MicroStrategy.
MicroStrategy is widely considered a proxy for bitcoin.