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.
Brad Gerstner, Altimeter Founder and CEO, speaks at the Delivering Alpha conference in New York City on Sept. 28, 2023.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC
Investor Brad Gerstner cautioned Monday that OpenAI‘s deals with Nvidia and AMD are purely announcements, not deployments.
“Now we will see what gets delivered,” the Altimeter Capital founder told CNBC. “Ultimately, the best chips will win.”
OpenAI’s megadeal with AMD and its relentless push to expand artificial intelligence capabilities underscores the intensifying competitive landscape.
Gerstner said the deals provide “more evidence that the world will remain compute-constrained despite best efforts to bring massive supply online.”
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Experts say it’s also another validation of the AI arms race heating up, with AI a key element in the geopolitical race between the U.S. and China.
OpenAI’s Chinese rival DeepSeek sent shockwaves last year when it claimed to have a lower-cost AI model than its U.S. peer. And Deepseek has continued to innovate, delivering new open-sourced models using domestically made AI chips.
Last week, the U.S. government issued a report warning of DeepSeek’s national security concerns, Axios reported.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation said DeepSeek provides Chinese Communist Party views more frequently than U.S. models, according to Axios.
OpenAI’s partnership with AMD is raising hopes that it is taking the right steps to increase production and build more complex AI models.
“What we’re really seeing is a world where there’s going to be absolute compute scarcity, because there’s going to be so much demand for AI services, and not just from OpenAI, really from the whole ecosystem,” OpenAI President told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Monday. “And so that’s why it’s just so important for this whole industry to come together.”
The AppLovin logo arranged on a smartphone in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AppLovin shares plummeted on Monday after Bloomberg reported that the SEC has been probing the mobile advertising company over its data-collection practices.
The agency has been looking into whether the company violated agreements on pushing targeted ads to consumers, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The report said that the SEC is responding to a whistleblower complained filed this year along with multiple short-seller reports, and added that neither the company nor its officials have been accused of wrongdoing.
An AppLovin spokesperson said the company doesn’t typically comment on the “existence or non-existence” of regulatory matters.
“That said, as a global public company, we regularly engage with regulators and if we get inquiries we address them in the ordinary course,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Material developments, if any, would be disclosed through the appropriate public channels.”
The stock dropped 14% in regular trading after the report, which landed shortly before market close. It fell another 5% in extended trading.
AppLovin’s stock has been on a tear, jumping about 80% this year after soaring more than 700% in 2024. The surge has been driven by the company’s artificial intelligence technology that’s allowed it to provide better ad targeting capabilities to brands.
Last month, AppLovin was added to the S&P 500, replacing MarketAxess Holdings, at the same time that Robinhood joined the index in place of Caesars Entertainment.
AppLovin made the move into the benchmark despite a short-seller’s effort to keep it out.
In March, Fuzzy Panda Research advised the committee for the large-cap U.S. index to keep AppLovin from becoming a constituent. AppLovin shares dropped 15% in December, when the committee picked Workday to join the S&P 500.
Three notable short-seller firms, including Fuzzy Panda, have slammed AppLovin of late. The latest was Muddy Waters Research, which in March said the company’s ad tactics “systematically” violate app stores’ terms of service by “impermissibly extracting proprietary IDs from Meta, Snap, TikTok, Reddit, Google, and others.” In so doing, AppLovin is funneling targeted ads to users without their consent, Muddy Waters said.
Fuzzy Panda and Culper Research put out reports the prior month, taking aim at AppLovin’s AXON software, which drove its earnings growth and stock surge. The shares dropped 12% on Feb. 26, the day of the short reports.
After those reports were published, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi wrote a blog post, defending his company’s technology and practices, and taking aim at the short sellers trying to profit from AppLovin’s decline.
Figma signage appears at the New York Stock Exchange in New York as the company prepares for its shares to begin trading on July 31, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Figma shares jumped 7% on Monday after the design software vendor’s technology was promoted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an onstage demo at his company’s annual DevDay conference in San Francisco.
Altman discussed Figma’s integration into ChatGPT, which has more than 800 million monthly users. He showed how third-party applications could plug in with OpenAI’s Apps SDK, or software development framework.
“When someone’s using ChatGPT, you’ll be able to find an app by asking for it by name,” Altman said. “For example, you could sketch out a product flow for ChatGPT and then say, Figma, turn this sketch into a workable diagram. The Figma app will take over respond and complete the action.”
In addition to asking for Figma’s help by name in ChatGPT, the assistant can also suggest Figma when it’s relevant, Figma product manager Luke Zhang said in a blog post.
The rally for Figma, at its high point, was the steepest since the day of the company’s public market debut on the New York Stock Exchange in July.
Figma has been ramping up its own tools for working on app and website designs using generative AI models from OpenAI and other providers.
Subscribers to products that connect to the Apps SDK will be able to log in without leaving their ChatGPT conversations, Altman said. He said people working on products in Figma can also launch the FigJam tool to keep working on development ideas. Apps SDK is based on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that OpenAI rival Anthropic introduced last year.
Software developers will be able to submit apps for review later in 2025, Altman said.
Over time, OpenAI will offer many ways to generate revenue through third-party integrations, Altman said. Last week, OpenAI announced a feature allowing people to buy products listed on Etsy through ChatGPT.