The Dow industrials — generous to a fault all year — look like they’re wrapping up another weekly gain and putting it under the tree for us.
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There is still a full session to go today, of course. And many good boys and girls seem to have been wanting a cryptocurrency for Christmas instead.

Though maybe not anymore. Bitcoin BTCUSD, +2.64% and its brethren have been falling hard. The No. 1 crypto recently was around $12,800 after trading as low as $12,436 this morning, according to CoinDesk data.

So is this the beginning of the end for bitcoin?

Not necessarily, according to our call of the day, which comes from ETX Capital’s Neil Wilson.

“Has the bubble finally popped? It’s hard to see the bell tolling just yet,” Wilson writes in a note. “We can easily see this market bounce back in very short order.”

He sees some conventional profit-taking at work. That’s as bitcoin’s year-to-date gain is cut to a mere 1,400% or so, and Goldman Sachs reportedly works on launching a trading desk for it.

“Whilst there have been some hacks, public infighting in the mining community, lots of rumored forks and regulatory pressure building on some fronts, this is likely to be a simple bout of risk-off selling as investors rebalance towards year-end,” ETX’s senior market analyst says.

“It looks like it’s time to cash in the gains and spend the winnings on a bumper Christmas.”

You can’t buy that much with bitcoin, and investors cashing out for traditional currencies are sending its price lower, Wilson suggests.

His take dovetails somewhat with a recent bit of advice from Barry Ritholtz. “Sell enough — perhaps half — to become rich in reality and not just on paper; then let the other half ride,” the Ritholtz Wealth Management CIO wrote earlier this week while bitcoin was above $16K.

Getting back to Wilson, he stresses that big price swings have been normal for bitcoin.