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 it looks like inflation came in at 3.2% vs a consensus of 3.3% and last month's 3%, while core inflation continues to fall, coming in at 4.7% vs 4.8% expectations and last month levels. IMO these are decent numbers, it still marks the first month in about 12 months where headline inflation has risen, but it was an expected quantity by this point and the level coming in lower than expected I think is a small win...net net I think we are in line here on numbers and perhaps shouldn't see a huge move either way. Equities seem to like it and are up 0.6% and 0.9% on the SPX and NDQ in the futures market while interest rates have rallied a little bit having initially sold off in expectation, putting the curve at 477/409/397/416bps across 2/5/10/30y. With these nerves out the way and the next event being payrolls in first week of Sep and the FOMC not til later in Sep, it begs the question what happens for the rest of August. In normal conditions one would expect a steady really and although I think that's not impossible, given we're just off YTD highs in stocks I expect we're in for some boring crabbing this month.
**CRYPTO** - Pretty much zero reaction by crypto to the CPI number, BTC sits unchanged at 29.5K and ETH at 1855. No big moves in altcoins either way but it's impressive to see RLB hold its gains from a couple of days ago. Worth noting that bitcoin dominance did drop sligtly to 50.46% and personaly I think there is going to be more to go there. It continues to be an "on chain summer" with a tonne of trading activity on utility and meme coins on chain and that is certainly the focus for a lot of people. That stuff to me feels like "something you do when you're bored" and thus I think crabbing ETH (ie low ETH vol) is probably conducive to a lot of on-chain activity. My gut is we'll see shitcoins continue to do well here although it may be a game of hot potato in many cases.
**NFTs** - As usual very little to write home about. Yesterday we got some news that y00ts (part of the DeGods ecosystem) will be moving to Ethereum from Polygon. That seems to be the biggest news which I think is the mark of a sorry state of affairs in NFTs with really not much going on at all. It appears DeGods have sold off slightly on the news and are down 4% overnight. Miladies continue to be one of the strongest performers and clilmbed by a further 20% to a price of above 4ETH; that marks a 52% return on the week which is rather impressive in such a challenging market. Elsewhere it seems there was a bug found in Jack Butcher's latest project, infinity, which was abused to drain all the funds. It sounds like everyone is being issued a full refund which is good to see, but another reminder of how cautious you have to be in this space.
**REPORTS** - Proof Grails Season IV is of particular interest today. For those who don’t know what the project is about, it is essentially 20 artworks, made by 20 different artists, with holders of the Grails Mint pass being able to burn the pass and redeem one of those artworks. The twist here is that although you can see the art, the artists are only revealed after the claim period is over (which for this season is 11th August at 07:00 United Kingdom Time). This produces a lot of speculation and hype for reveal day. With huge names in every season such as Larva Labs, Snowfro, Deafbeef etc, who knows which famous artists will be part of season IV. To find out more about the history of the project, make sure to read our in-depth report releasing this week.
GL today!