Elon-boosted, BTC takes off 

Elon Musk's touch, King Midas-y, okay, stipulated. But could Musk simply adding #bitcoin to his Twitter bio actually cause BTC to suddenly snap?

BTC jumped 14% in about 30 minutes – in most years, the S&P 500 doesn't go that high – beginning moments after Musk made the tweak.

"This has to be the biggest upsurge in history," Bitcoin evangelist Joseph Young tweeted, as BTC rose above $37K.

Young pointed out a “perfect storm,” perhaps, of options expiry, as well as the attention heaped upon day-trading excitement, with Reddit forum dwellers in the role of David, hedge funds as Goliath and GameStop flying out of a slingshot.

BTC moving past $37,000 was still very much in play as of 8 a.m. (EST). The price was $36,800. January’s winding down and BTC is on a pace to notch a 30% return for the month.

“It seems like Musk single-handedly saved the day,” Decrypt said.

Dow futures tanked 300 points early on Friday morning (EST) a sign that a nasty session was in the works.

Investors of all stripe, size and risk-awareness levels are clashing in a hall of fun house mirrors. Somewhere in the distorted glass flying about is a clear, unmistakable image: volatility run amok

GameStop was $5 this summer. Just in December the chain announced it was closing 1,000 stores. In pre-market trading in the U.S. GME was almost $400 a share. Everybody is talking about this. Legislators want hearings. Online brokers need cash. Pundits need help explaining how a short squeeze works. And veteran traders are grasping for a sign that markets haven’t gone off the rails.

The Dow lost some 600 points on Wednesday. That day, volume exceeded 23 billion shares, surpassing levels not seen since 2008 during the worst of the global financial crisis.

Yesterday, the Dow rebounded by 300 points on a day that everything seemed to rally. Take Dogecoin, adopted by a reddit group called SatoshiStreetBets. DOGE rocketed 900% to almost $0.08, an all-time high, early on Friday.

Over the past few hours, however, DOGE fell 40% off that mark.

Not content to squeeze GameStop shorts, the r/wallstreetbets crowd has turned its attention to silver.

Pile into IShares Silver Trust (SLV), the largest silver ETF, thread participants had cajoled to one another yesterday, Bloomberg reported, noting that some rhetorical-pitchfork-wielding community members bemoaned powerful forces unfairly keeping silver prices artificially low.

First Majestic Silver Corp., which was highlighted on Reddit as a short-squeeze target, rose nearly 40%.

SLV wound up popping 7%. Spot silver prices increased 6.8%. That’s the biggest move since late summer.

Said Phil Streible, strategist, Chicago-based Blue Line Futures: “There’s a short squeeze going on in silver."

Musk tweets, BTC erupts, we break it down:

* 43.7: Number of millions of Musk followers on Twitter.

* 3:22 A.M. (EST): Time stamp of Musk tweet.

* 13.9: Percentage increase that BTC had in about thirty minutes following Musk tweet.

* 57: Amount, in millions, of BTC short positions closed on Binance after Musk’s tweet.