The information in this message does not represent any financial or investment advice. They're just random thoughts in my head.
gm
**MACRO** - So we had yet another monster payrolls number on Friday as it came in at 353k vs expectations of 180k, while last month's number got revised upwards to 333k from 216k. This once again shows the pure strength and stickiness of the US labour market and definitely a little concerning for the inflation narrative given the FOMC we had. Interestingly stocks didn't mind at all as the SPX closed 1% higher and NDQ 2% higher with tech stocks leading the charge. As expected, however, we did see a continuation of the sell off in rates which now puts 10Y back up to 4.09%, but it's worth noting we are still some way off the highs of the year in terms of yield. Commentary over the weekend still suggests the Fed is planning rate cuts this year, but of course, the possibility of it happening next month now feels like slim to none. The start of the year continues to be a battle between economic strength and inflation worries.
**CRYPTO** - After some weekend weakness we look to be nicely in the green this morning with BTC back above 43k and ETH above 2300, while SOL is holding in well at around 98. When you experience massive price moves you are often expecting them to continue in crypto and tbh we've actually been pretty sturdy and stable for the past couple of weeks and we may just need to accept this is a new range we are going to be in for now. The current catalysts are continuing to keep an eye on ETF flows but it does seem like the GBTC outflows have significantly slowed, granted the inflows have also slowed and perhaps there's just an overall decline in volume there for now which is expected given the initial influx. We have the BTC halving in April but I think that's more of a "narrative" than an actual thing, and then we have the ETH ETF in May which I do still feel could be bullish for ETH. There's also something called the Dencun upgrade for ETH slated for the first quarter of this year. So there are a few things to keep an eye out for that I think are still potentially bullish, I think we kinda just have to be patient and perhaps trade the ranges. One thing that never really materialised was a post-JUP Solana ecosystem rally as memes generally continued to bleed although they seem to be showing some respite this morning. I'm not really sure why it didn't happen there, I guess people were already bleeding on memes and chose to cash in their JUP rather than chase them lower.
**NFTs** - Doesn't seem like there's been a tonne of action in ETH NFTs with most things a little bit lower, while Doodles interestingly seems to be strong still climbing by 16%. There was a rare BAYC sale for 88ETH, a blue beams trait, think that's the first time I've seen a higher-end BAYC sale in a long long time. For Solana NFTs most things seem to be slightly in the red, Mad Lads have actually started to drop a bit for the first time in a while falling down to 161 SOL. The start of the show in ordinals truly is Bitcoin Puppets which are up a further 29% to a floor of 0.0689 BTC and I am truly kicking myself for not buying any as it was the first ordinals project I really liked. The mysterious RSIC METAPROTOCOL is also up to a price of 0.09 BTC and has shown no signs of slowing.
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GL this week!