The information in this message does not represent any financial or investment advice. They're just random thoughts in my head.
gm
**MACRO** - The first day of the year starts in the red with the SPX down 0.8% and NDQ 1.8% to start. Rates have moved out a decent amount higher with 2/5/10/30y at 431/390/393/408bps. The theme this year imo, at least for the first half, is going to be "wen rate cuts?". The Fed indicated that there would be 75bps of cuts and most of the market seems to think that will happen in H2. IMO, especially given the election cycle, as soon as we start to see significantly weaker economic data the Fed is going to be very aggressive on shifting that timeline forwards. So each data point is going to be very, very important for how the narrative progresses. I'm still constructive on this year, I just think that the inflation trend will continue and the Fed will act fast when needed, and they have the power to do so. I don't think we'll see the same equity returns as last year, but we will end the year in the green still and riskier assets will outperform.
**CRYPTO** - A super strong 24H although we've cooled off a little, but BTC remains at 45.3K which is thru last year's highs I believe. As a result we've seen BTC dominance climb to 52.5% while ETH/BTC has dropped to 0.052. ETH and SOL seem stable at 2370 and 110 respectively, still below the highs that we saw last year, while SEI appears to be the L1 that's in foucs right now as it's climbed another 50% over the last few days to a price of 77c. We have 8 days left now until the final deadline for spot BTC ETFs and to be honest the headline could hit at literally any moment in between now and then. I am STILL confused as to whether this will be a sell-the-news or buy-the-pump event and my feeling changes on an intra-day basis. As of now I feel like the crypto market is setup to keep going higher here and each incremental bit of positive news, however telegraphed, will play its part to buoy prices. That being said, it feels like spot over leverage is probably wiser here given funding rates are high. I am pretty bullish on Solana-native tokens here too as we have the $JUP airdrop there coming in Jan or Feb which I think is going to act as a massive stimulus effect. There'll be lots of airdrops in Q1 actually, not to mention $1.1bn of liquidity being unlocked from Blast, followed by a probable airdrop, and all of these things I think will play a big impact in perhaps some of the smaller stuff rallying.
**NFTs** - Not a whole lot of price action in ETH NFTs in the past few days with BAYC still hovering in the high 20s and Pudgy Penguins impressively managing to hold onto a floor price of north of 10ETH. I think the thing to watch here really is Punks which has historically led the NFT market and previous cycles. Right now we sit at a floor of 55ETH and I think we want to see that head closer to 100ETH for a true NFT bull to be kicked off. In terms of news I'm sure you will have seen that we plan to gift equity to Rektguy holders in a snapshot we took in October last year. The Plague NFT is doing something similar, and I received a lot of questions about it thus my guess is we may see other projects do something similar. The important thing to remember here is that you cannot launch an NFT with future promises of equity as that would most certainly be deemed a security. It's certainly an interesting development and one worth tracking going forward.
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GL today!