The information in this message does not represent any financial or investment advice. They're just random thoughts in my head.
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MACRO - So yesterday we had a datapoint which is always off my radar and I always forget about it until after the fact, PPI. The YoY change for Jan came in at 6% vs 6.5% last month, but also meaningfully above expectations of 5.4%. While PPI does not gain as much focus as CPI or indeed payrolls, it's yet another datapoint which feels like it's somewhat disappointed. IMO this is why we saw markets sell off yesterday with SPX and NDQ closing 1.4% and 1.9% lower. We really better hope next month's payrolls and inflation data come in line with expectations otherwise there is a potential for there to be a mini panic and escalated fear ahead of the FOMC on later in March. Interest rates continue their ascent which puts the curve back to 469/412/391/395bps respectively across 2/5/10/30y. It takes us to new YTD highs on 10Y treasuries, levels not seen since November 2022. So yeah...don't ignore macro because right now it's feeling jittery and right when we thought we were out of the woods from an inflation standpoint, the picture has become less clear. Personally I think we will still see inflation collapse this year, but it's not the short-term numbers I'm worried about it's the tightness of the labour market and its implications on medium term inflation that's of greater concern. We saw Powell change his tune earlier this month, the risk is he changes it back next month.
CRYPTO - Well yesterday was pretty fucking wild as we saw some mega God candles on BTC and ETH which took them to levels of 25k and 1750 respectively. Unfortunately these levels did not hold and we're back down to 23.7K and 1663 but tbh that's decently elevated still from what we saw over the weekend. I've heard a lot of explanations for this move (which btw seemed concentrated in BTC and ETH and not really alts). Some say we were just oversold from the regulatory FUD which I of course agree with, but there is another rumour that on the back of aforementioned regulatory FUD large exchanges are converting stables into BTC (and maybe ETH idk). Apparently Binance did this with BUSD. It would corroborate the fact that majors have vastly outperformed in the last couple of days. If true, I'm not sure it's exactly the "best" thing for crypto if there are genuine concerns about stable coins..but I suppose we'll have to wait and see.
NFTs - So today we see NFT floors down about 5-10% across the board as $BLUR farming once again takes effect in full force. This comes after a whopping $101m of volume in the last 24H with Blur doing almost 6x the volumes of that of OpenSea. Remember when we thought we'd be glad to see the back of $BLUR farming? Well...looks like we're gonna have it now for AT LEAST another month, and it's a smart move on Blur's part as they can demonstrate consistent volumes and gain more market share. Whether it's good for the NFT market or not is another question and I think an obvious solution to this is to increase the minimum creator royalties (ensures projects get paid and disincentivises wash trading). IMO we'll see most of the NFT market rangebound here, farmers will list things down to a certain level which becomes attractive to buy and then everyone steps in to buy but we won't see aggressive upwards price action as farmers step back in to sell. It doesn't affect my favourite projects from a long-term perspective but I think it does mean the things with parabolic price action will be "new things" in the market, kind of like how shitcoins work.
GL today and touch some grass this w/e