Market Update: Thu 28th Sep
The information in this message does not represent any financial or investment advice. They're just random thoughts in my head.
gm
**MACRO** - Equities ended the day yesterday mostly unchanged, I guess NDQ was about 0.2% higher. Futures this morning are a touch lower and thus we are in full crab mode as markets remain quiet and will continue to do so imo until next Friday's payrolls. The big concern continues to be oil prices where WTI remains elevated above $93/barrel. Consequently, this has once again caused upwards pressure on interest rates which now sees 2Y back up to 5.14% and 10Y at 4.65%. Even if we get soft labour market data next week, which I do think will alleviate interest rates, it feels like we're back to the concerns of H1 2022 when oil started spiralling out of control. It's definitely something to be wary of.
**CRYPTO** - We're certainly seeing some ETH outperformance here this morning with it back up to 1623 while BTC stays at 26.5K. The ETH/BTC ratio momentarily touched 0.62 today so a decent bounce off the lows. There seems to be some rumours on twitter about the SEC approving a bunch of different ETH futures ETFs (note, futures not spot) ahead of the government shutdown: https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1707203091785732272?s=20. That would certainly explain its strength and yet again it makes you wonder how long it is until they start approving spot applications if these start to go through. I have to think the SEC are under the kosh a bit here in terms of resources, having lost multiple court cases and with big decisions to make in the next few weeks/months, with Gensler's job under intense scrutiny. I just don't see how they successfully fight back here and against an entire industry that feels like it has very powerful resources to fight cases.
**NFTs/Misc** - After their recent pump, Pudgy Penguins lost about 7% to fall back to an FP of 4.9ETH. Everything else looks like it's down about 5-7% across the board on volumes that continue to be thin but are certainly non zero. There continues to be artist success stories with diewiththemostlikes' recent Beef Brothko drop continuing to dominate a lot of the timeline which is impressive for a drop of 666. We also saw a 1/1 of his change hands at just north of 7 ETH. FriendTech TVL continues to rise and we're up to $42m there now with total volume and return users staying roughly flat day on day. I do wonder how long we'll have to wait until the airdrop there, feels like a few months still...for those trying to maximise that I think you want to maintain a liquid portfolio of as many of the top 250 as you can as portfolio value seems to be the main driver of airdrop points. If you want good FT analysis make sure you check out degenz.finance/friendtech too.
GL today!