Funds are selling ether. Bitmine will stop buying.

On Wednesday Tom Lee, the chairman of Bitmine, told a conference in Singapore that the company will stop buying ether once it owns 5% of all of it. Bitmine is a listed company that has paid for its ether by selling its own shares.

It held 6,016,414 ether on 4 October, and Lee said about 100,000 more would reach the limit. At Thursday's price that is about $250 million.

Ether closed Tuesday at $2,699 and Thursday at $2,474, down 8.3%.

Bitcoin fell 4.5% over the same two days. The reading going round is that ether has lost its buyer.

That buyer is the smaller of two. The US spot ether funds lost $201.9 million to withdrawals on Tuesday and $160.9 million on Wednesday. Together that is more than the $250 million Bitmine has left to spend.

The funds have now had withdrawals on seven sessions in a row, from 29 September to 7 October, $568.8 million in all. Thursday's figure isn't in our record yet.

Our record of these funds starts on 2 April, and this is the third-longest run of withdrawals in it. The two longer ones lasted 17 sessions from 11 May and nine from 17 June.

They drained the funds at about $53 million and $41 million a day. This run is averaging $81 million, and Tuesday's and Wednesday's were the second- and third-largest single days in the whole record.

Ether fell 20% over the first of those runs and 12% over the second. Four weeks after the second ended it was 22% higher. Which of those the current run resembles depends on what the funds paid, and we can estimate that.

Those two earlier runs came after weeks of buying, and so did the current one. In August and September together the funds took in a net $2.67 billion. In the five sessions from 1 October to Wednesday they gave back $506.4 million of it, about a fifth. The funds don't publish what they paid, and what a withdrawal costs them depends on it. We can work it out, and it changes how we read this week.