The information in this message does not represent any financial or investment advice. They're just random thoughts in my head.
gm
**MACRO** - Unfortunately what's dominating the global timeline right now is the situtation in the Middle East. I am not a geopolitical expert but you only have to be human to feel a lot of pain as to what's going on over there. From what I've read it looks like a situation that could escalate but I have no real edge in predicting that and I really hope it doesn't. What does it mean for markets? Well, knee-jerk reaction for equities is they head lower, and indeed SPX and NDQ are both 0.6% and 0.7% lower to start the day in the futures market. It's a funny one for interest rates, because usually they do go lower in times of war, but the conflicting effect you have here is the price of oil is likely to climb again, and we're up about 5% to $86/barrel. That will once again put in inflationary pressures to the market and thus is not great for rates. It looks like the whole US treasury curve is up about 7-8bps this morning. This week on Thursday we have CPI. It looks like the expectation is for headline inflation to actually drop vs last month (3.6% from 3.7%) and fore core to also drop to 4.1% from 4.3%. I think those numbers would be nice to see given we've just had a couple of months of rising inflation, but I would certainly expect some vol around this and keep an eye on these consensus numbers to change.
**CRYPTO** - There is a narrative that war is good for bitcoin as a save haven; I don't think we saw it when Russia/Ukraine kicked off and I'm not sure we'll see it right away here but BTC dominance continues to rise nonetheless and we are up to 51.06%, getting close to the 52% highs we saw back in July. ETH continues to trade like garbage and that ratio has dropped down to 0.058, which is the lows of not only this year but also the last 12 months. As I mentioned last week, it feels like what crypto wants to do here is drift lower. Lots of psychologically scarred longs frustrated from a lack of price action and slow realisation that we may not see any positive news for crypto until the new year. I think that once again brings back the DCA strategy as being the best one but I'm certainly not inclined to sell here as I think we are too close to the paradigm shift and it's much harder to buy back in once you've missed a big move higher, which I still feel inevitably happens in the next 3 months (Ark's BTC ETF deadline on 10th Jan being the point at which I'm looking to the future on). I'm kind of expecting a meh few weeks but have a hope we see a rally in December and onwards.
**NFTs & Misc** - In pfp land the "biggest" news might be that of DeGods after he put out a tweet titled "The Comeback" which talks about "resetting", allowing holders to swtich between Season 1, 2 or 4 on DeGods and launching something redacted. To me it is another nothing addition - I think what DeGods has done brilliantly is branding, building IP and "looking cool" but where it has fallen over is overhyping things that lack substance and as a result it means you are doomed to fail in an environment where NFTs are dead. I view this announcement as more of the same (ie, there is no substance behind it) but I hope to be proven wrong as I would like to see more projects succeed, and I am rooting for them to do so especially where founders are passionate and have the right intentions like Frank. Elsewhere the other big headline this weekend was an exploit found in StarsArena on AVAX which resulted in $3m being lost.
Find all of our charts on Degenz.Finance and make sure to subscribe to the Mando Minutes Newsletter at mandominutes.com for even more news on the Macro, Crypto and NFT landscapes:
GL today!