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 - We ended the week with equities mostly unchanged but it's a solid start for futures this morning with SPX and NDQ up 0.25% and 0.35% respectively. Interest rates haven't done a whole lot of late but I would note that we are somewhat off the highs today, currently at 484/407/382/389bps across 2/5/10/30y. Definitely keep an eye on interest rates this week as we head into the FOMC which I think will be an important one. The meeting starts tomorrow and concludes on Wednesday - we'll find out if the Fed chooses to hold interest rates steady or put in another hike. More importantly, it will be interesting to see if they start to soften their language a bit given the rapid reduction in US inflation (and btw we also have PCE data on the same day) but I think the base case for most is that they will reiterate previous language given how strong labour market data continues to be. After that, the Fed breaks until September...so what they do say could really set the tone for what will be a 2-month period until we hear from them again.
CRYPTO - More of the same stuff tbh, it's been a rather frustrating chop in a narrow channel for a good few weeks now which will frustrate shorts and longs alike. We saw BTC breach 30K and ETH 1900 yesterday only for me to wake up and see things back down to 29.7K and 1870. Something I would note is it looks like alts got a little more hurt than usual overnight and indeed that feeling is confirmed by the fact that BTC dominance is now back above 50%. With that first move it does feel like it makes alts a little fragile here and we never really saw the alt szn we were hoping for after the XRP/SEC news largely because BTC failed to break out...I think we just need this sell pressure on BTC to clear before anyting else can rally meaningfully. We have the FOMC this week and although I expect some short term movement I'm not sure if it will yet be enough to break crypto out - feels like we need some new buyers and I would view more positive news on XRP/SEC or ETF approvals to be more important. I'm still very bullish here but it feels like we need a bit more than initially anticipated to get us moving.
NFTs - NFTs sadly continue to descend lower with the top 10 all down another 5-10% over the weekend. What feels most alarming is the Azuki complex which is down to 4.99ETH on the OGs, 0.68ETH on Elementals and 0.95ETH on Elemental Beans. That puts Azuki at down 66% in the last 30 days which is rather grim. I don't really have much else to add here on NFTs...I just think it's becoming clear now...the NFTs that have held up well int he last 30d are the ones where people genuinely either appreciate the art or value being part of the community enough that they don't want to sell it, the ones that have fallen a lot are NFTs that people held primarily to make money or having had expectations that weren't met. I think we will continue to see more of the same.
Reports - This week we are artist heavy, including the likes of generative superstar Dmitri Cherniak, mural master Pascal Boyart, Dr Doodle Vinnie Hager and ‘Iconic’ who have worked with the Jackson Pollock studio to create limited edition NFT prints. On the project front, the monkey meta projects are making a comeback with revisit reports for Solana Monke Business and Cyberkongz who have new hyped up mints worth covering. Finally, we have a brand new brand trying to make it big in the Web3 anime scene, Weebox.
GL this week!