Market Update: Mon 26th Aug

Last week of summer

gm

**MACRO** - Well the big event last week was Jackson Hole at which Jerome Powell finally gave us the most dovish commentary we have heard in a long time, confirming what the market already seems to be pricing in. He mentioned that the Fed is now confident on the trajectory of inflation and indicated a policy change. Of course, even before his speech, rate cuts in September were widely expected so in my opinion there isn't much new information here; rather if he was not dovish I think the markets would have gotten a little concerned. Nontheless equities rallied on Friday with SPX and NDQ both closing 1.2% higher, while futures are up again this morning and 10Y sits at range lows of around 3.79%. This week is going to be especially quiet with the UK out on Bank holiday today and the US out for Labour day on Monday. Next Friday we get payrolls and from then on I think it's game on in terms of activity picking back up. One thing to note is Kamala/Trump polls have become rather narrow with Trump momentarily taking the lead and I think it's important to keep sight of that for the next 3 months.

**CRYPTO** - We finally broke through the 60k resistance level on BTC which now takes us up to around 64k, while ETH is at 2.7K and SOL at 160. ETH continues to lag after SOL had a decent move higher over the weekend. With rate cuts around the corner and Trump once again leading we've finaly seen a bit of relief for crypto, but it's still a huge underperformance in the context of equities, not to mention away from majors many memecoins and altcoins are massively lower. I think Q4 is going to be interesting and personally I still feel like we could be set for a decent rally but I think I still stand in the camp that that could serve as some kind of top after which we take longer consolidation over a few months...UNLESS Trump wins and we see some proactive action on the regulatory front.

GL today