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 - A rather benign day yesterday in equities in what continues to be a rather quiet start to the year; stocks closed unchanged on both SPX and NDQ while futures are a small amount higher this morning. Today we get data on retail sales for December which is a month-on-month number. The consensus is for a -0.8% decline vs a -0.6% decline in the previous month. This will be a relatively important number, in particular, market participants are probably hoping for it to be a bigger decline than expected as this would be another datapoint of a weakening economy and thus more pressure on the Fed to pivot. Of course, it always depends on the magnitude of the decline, and if we saw a decline that was "too large" there comes a point where people get more worried about a recession effect outweighing any pivot. It's worth noting we saw a pretty decent rally in interest rates yesterday which now takes 10 to 3.48%, while oil has been creeping higher to now north of $81.
CRYPTO - The strength in majors continues to be sustained as BTC holds above 21K and ETH holds at 1575. There were a couple more attempts for ETH to break 1600 yesterday but so far that has proved to be a strong resistance point. There was some weakness in alts with a few things drifting about 2-5% lower, in particular $APE is about 7% lower back down to $4.78 after Yuga Labs delayed the Sewer Pass mint by one day. Away from that I don't have much more to add here other than it just feels like crypto is poised to break out further, we'll see.
NFTs - We continue to see NFTs drift lower with most things down about 3-5%, with the Yuga complex trending lower. Volumes still seem very robust, in particular there was 503ETH of MAYC trades yesterday, half of which was apparently swept by one person. With the Sewer Pass mint delayed, the sentiment in the Yuga complex will certainly be a bit softer today; no one likes a delayed mint but it's certainly better than a mint that's messed up. The memes continue to display strong trading volumes and some consistency. Other than that volumes are relatively benign and we continue to await the outcome of $BLUR.
GL today!