The information in this message does not represent any financial or investment advice. They're just random thoughts in my head.
gm
MACRO - Stocks bounced back with a vengeance yesterday with SPX closing 1.15% higher and NDQ closing 1.75% higher. This came after strong economic data out of the US, with consumer confidence reaching its highest level since 2022 and purchases of new homes rising at its fastest rate in the last 12 momths. This once again strengthens the narrative of a "soft landing", ie the Fed having successfully raised interest rates and tackled inflation, all without significantly damaging the economy. If you rewind back 12-18 months ago you'll remember that the fear and base expectations were that the Fed's aggressive hiking policy would send the US into a deep recession and that would be the difficult aftermath of all of this. So far, the data has not shown anything akin to it and we're all too familiar with the strength of the US labour market in the last year or so.
CRYPTO - Yesterday we saw BTC wick to 31K after it was confirmed that Fidelity would be applying for a BTC ETF. I want to once again reiterate that this is massive IMO; Fido are the third largest asset manager in the world managing $4.2trln in assets; the largest being Blackrock (who have also applied) at $9trln. The fact 2/3 of the largest AMs have made these applications IMO tells you that 1) there is a higher probability of success compared to previous applications 2) there is client demand for crypto. It's the big "institutions are coming" news we've all been waiting for and IMO it actually times up very well with all the bullish narratives we can expect to see in 2024 (Fed cutting rates, BTC halving and now institutions are actually coming). We also saw ETH wick to 1910 but both majors have since given up gains and currently sit at 30.3K and 1859 respectively. There's obviously still some kind of technical overhang and I think the DCA strategy would have served you incredible over the past 12 months but I do keep asking myself if I should get more aggressive here as I'm still incredibly bullish over a 1-2 year timeframe.
NFTs - Well, needless to say Azuki stole yesterday's headlines with the floor dropping by a whopping 30% to 8.79ETH. The Elemental dutch auction sold out at 2ETH with a gas war leaving many initially disappointed, before a dodgy reveal displaying a lot of similar art to Azuki and giving it a massively dilutive effect (it now just feels like there's 30K Azuki and the OG holders have not really been rewarded here). Unrevealed Beans currently sit at mint price while the revealed floor is at 1.77ETH. We also saw Beanz drop by another 31% to an FP of 0.6ETH, making that down 50% in the past week. I'm not really sure why Azuki did what they did; there's an element of wanting to grow your community and user base which I totally understand, but that could have been easily done by having different art (for example I think the animals in the Elementals collection look very sick and just making the whole thing animal variants would have not only sufficed but outperformed). From the mint process to metadata mistakes, the whole thing feels rather rushed as they netted $40m and completed their mint just before the highly anticipated Ether mint - the rumour there being they rushed it to pip the liquidity suck from those guys. I'm curious to see what they do to bounce back from it, but the story here for me really changed from "these guys know what they're doing" to "these guys actually don't know what they're doing" and I've yet seen an NFT company do something materially creative outside of just "selling more NFTs when the time is right". Let's see what happens next few days...but just when you thought you couldn't be shocked any further...it happens.
REPORTS - Let’s take a breather from Azuki and look instead at one of the artists we are reporting on this week. Matt Kane, simply put, is a legend of the space, not just in terms of insane sale numbers, but also technical and artistic wizardry. Matt in the early days of the space created a number of 1/1s that explored themes of pop and crypto culture. They proved incredibly successful, however, what truly cemented his legendary status in the space was his pioneering generative Art Blocks Curated collection, ‘Gazers’. Each Gazer is unique, however, they are all forever evolving and tied to the motion of the moon and other important events in Matt’s life. This means that when you look at a Gazer, it will never look that way again. Now isn’t that beautiful.
GL today!
Current floor Gazer #188 (17ETH)