The information in this message does not represent any financial or investment advice. They're just random thoughts in my head.
gm
MACRO - After last week's damp squib, we are starting the week of with futures up 0.3% on both SPX and NDQ, having both closed an additional 1% lower last week. We're also seeing interest rates progress a little bit higher which puts the curve at 419/365/353/360bps across 2/5/10/30y. The "Santa Claus rally" we were all hoping for somewhat failed to materialise although I would note that the last 3 weeks have generally been a good one for risk assets and we are a reasonable amount off lows still in stocks. It still feels like to me markets don't believe Powell here. Bill Gross also wrote an interesting article in the FT on the case for for pausing hikes: https://www.ft.com/content/c3cb8378-cac0-4bb1-be7c-170ca002f9fb . It feels like next year is going to be a game of putting pressure on Powell and the Fed to pause and potentially cut but it seems we won't get that without a weaker labour market.
CRYPTO - After a shaking few days on Binance FUD, it appears majors have stabilised to around 16.7K on BTC and 1185 on ETH which I think puts it relatively in line with the post-FOMC move in equities, beta adjusted. It seems to me most of the market has seen through the Binance FUD, and of course there were rumours of DCG having to liquidate things which cause a big red candle over the weekend. At this point I've sort of lost count of the times we get these aggressive moves lower and honestly this one really didn't feel as bad as others. We saw $APE retreat a decent amount back down to 3.5 from recent highs of 4.2, and I would expect that a lot of people who were playing for an initial staking pump got disappointed and probably exited.
NFTs - Indeed the headline collection over the weekend was Trump Digital Trading cards which hit a floor price of almost 0.8ETH before crashing back down to around 0.3, with decent volumes going through. It's pretty impressive how many people have spare capital still to FOMO chase memes, kinda makes me feel bullish lol. Elsewhere the volatility in Valhalla continues as a further 600E of volume in the last 24H has carried that to a floor of 1.3E. Away from that price action seems relatively mixed across the board while volumes have certainly fallen from their initial Blur pump. There's two weeks left until the end of the year but it's not clear when the actual date for the $BLUR airdrop is, it could be at the beginning, middle or end of January so that's something to bear in mind.
GL this week!