The information in this message does not represent any financial or investment advice. They're just random thoughts in my head.
gm @everyone
**MACRO** - The great big CPI day has probably returned the most meh set of results I thin unfortunately. It looks like headline inflation came in at 3.7%, 0.1% above consensus and up 0.5% from last month's 3.2%. This is the second month in a row that inflation has been higher after 11 months of straight decline, and it's quite clear now that the 3% level we saw earlier was the bottom, at least for now. A lot of the increase has been as a result of rising energy prices, the measure of core inflation (excluding food and energy prices) actually came in at 4.3% vs last month's 4.7% but in line with expectations. If you look at core inflation, I think it's actually pretty encouraging to see that continuing to trend lower and drop in a meaningful way.
If we get two more months of lower core inflation coupled with a weakening labour market then I think there's a good shot markets start to speculate rate cuts for 2024 in more of an intense fashion. That's what I'm hoping for to round out the end of the year I think. In terms of price action equities are unchanged having had a weak day yesterday and interest rates are unchanged too which I think is a testament to the fact that these numbers are completely in line with expectations.
**CRYPTO** - It looks like after yesterday's short squeeze BTC has settled at around 26.1k and ETH at 1595. Visually that looks like an outperformance of BTC vs ETH and indeed it kind of is with the ratio dropping from 0.064 to 0.061 over the course of a month or so. Bitcoin dominance has seen the most meaningful move in a while and we're all the way back up to 50% now, so it appears that its recent underperformance has been corrected which is a promising sign and I can only hope that some of the sell pressure there has subsided. There hasn't been a huge change in open interest either way in majors. Basically I think it's a healthy move here and if we were to see a move higher it would be one that would start leading altcoins too given dominance is back above 50%. Yesterday we saw Franklin Templeton apply for a BTC ETF too (20th largest asset manager in the world managing >$1trln in assets) and I think we continue to see pressure on the SEC now to approve something.
**NFTs** - Generally a continued slide here on low volumes as most collections look like they're down 3-4%. Miladys continue to be topical with an internal fallout and plenty of accusations which I care not to go into but it looks like we've seen a further 12% decline to a floor of 2.4ETH there. Elsewhere we saw a loan on an Autoglyph get liquidated for 100ETH despite the best bid being 158ETH out there. Pretty insane and a great deal for the lender; I think there's a lot of people who are gonna make decent money on lending against NFTs they are happy to own/underwrite. Elsewhere something you're probably seeing return on the TL is friendtech. TVL on it has now reached 17,500ETH in just a month, for comparison, Blur TVL stood at 24,500ETH about 4 months after launch (h/t punk9059). It doesn't seem like FT has had amazing user growth though which means it's a lot of existing people bridging ETH and buying. Personally I've started using it a lot more this week and have found it to be a more curated version of Twitter with some good group chats - it does feel heavy on speculation but there's always half a chance with these things that they can breakout and get crazy price action. Personally I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen here...some kind of a meteoric rise and blow off top before things cool down. Let's see.
GL out there today!