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- Elon Musk, the world's richest person, has put meme numbers like "420" into the spotlight.
- Spectra Markets told Bloomberg that crypto traders now need to factor meme and round numbers into their strategies.
- The world of finance has become increasingly meme-ified this year.
Elon Musk is the purveyor of memes and meme numbers.
"Due to inflation 420 has gone up by 69," he wrote in tweet late Sunday.
While a joke, meme numbers like "420" and "69" may actually be an important part of an investing strategy, according to an "Odd Lots" article from Bloomberg. Brent Donnelly, president of Spectra Markets, told Bloomberg that "anyone leaving a bitcoin sell order at $69,501 this week probably doesn't know what they are doing."
"On the other hand, the ones that sold at $68,998 are probably expert traders that understand markets, memes, and crowd psychology," he told Bloomberg.
That's because bitcoin's high and low prices are statistically most likely to fall on numbers with a "00" or "50" in their last two digits, Donnelly said. There's even a slight tendency toward "420" in the last three digits, according to the data shared with Bloomberg.
Donnelly said stop-loss orders should be on the "correct side" of the round or meme number, buy-stops should be above "00" as the last two digits, and sell-stops should be below.
Musk, the head of Tesla and world's richest person, tweeted last month a more raunchy meme that predicted bitcoin at $69,000 and ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency, at $4,200.
The numbers have since come to fruition. Last week, bitcoin hit an all-time high of about $69,000 before pulling back. And Ethereum, for its part, has soared past the $4,200 mark recently and traded around $4,700 on Monday.
The growing prevalence of meme numbers isn't limited to trading though. Sam Bankman-Fried, the chief executive officer of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, raised $420 million in the latest round of funding from exactly 69 investors. And other examples show how the world of finance has become increasingly meme-ified since the start of the year, when GameStop created the concept of "meme stocks."
Donnelly, who authored the book "Alpha Trader," did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.