Rekt Mkts: We're back

Apologies for the quick break, I was travelling last week for Korea Blockchain Week and Token 2049. There are tonnes of crypto events throughout the year, every month, across the globe...and I generally think they aren't worth going to unless you want to party...however, there's a handful of them every year where pretty much everyone attends and it's a great moment to chat markets with ppl when you're in an environment outside of "the arena". Key takeaways for me from this year were: - general consensus that we're very early bull cycle, I would say about 50% of people expected some form of larger pullback before the continued leg up - pretty much everyone I spoke to were in full believe of privacy+quantum resistance+ai resistance coins being the main feature of this cycle and continued strength as it progresses - did not speak to many people who were bullish on the whole tokenised stocks thing - obviously a few people are bullish on BP and W is a big mover today, but the excitement around that seemed much weaker - more people were bullish on NEAR rather than ZEC, lots of mixed and polar opinions on the latter - memes of very little focus for anyone, might be the first conference I've been to where pretty much no one mentioned a meme coin to me - social trading/trading as a sport seems to be catching on as a concept; there were three different epsorts-style trading games which were successful (notably the Coinbase one received 22M views on X)...while I don't subscribe to the view that "traders are the new athletes" I do think the concept of "trading personalities or celebrities" will continue to grow and get bigger - I met with a few different crypto projects and I think there's some interesting stuff coming up over the next few weeks - one thing for sure everyone is making a massive push

WTI futures are around $93.20, back up after falling earlier, while gold futures are around $4,195. September US CPI is due on Wednesday. With further Fed tightening still in the discussion, the inflation number matters...and oil failing to hang on to its decline isn't helping the outlook beyond that release. The US cash Treasury market is closed for Columbus Day, so Friday's yields are the reference: the 10Y finished around 5.24%, up roughly 1bp, while the 30Y was around 5.60%, little changed. Still high borrowing costs rather than much relief from bonds. Stocks are open today; cash Treasuries reopen tomorrow.

S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures are both close to flat. The early lift hasn't turned into much follow-through. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Citi report tomorrow before the open, so there will soon be something more concrete than ceasefire headlines to trade off. The useful bit is whether their outlook points to healthy lending and manageable credit losses...a strong trading quarter on its own doesn't tell us that...I'm generally not super locked in on bank earnings but I think it's worth paying attention to. Amazon is reportedly in talks to buy Decart for around $7bn. It isn't an agreed acquisition yet. Decart's software helps developers move AI workloads between different chips, which could make it easier for AWS customers to use Amazon's own processors. Useful for Amazon if it makes switching hardware less of a headache for developers, but not a reason to assume another big AI cheque is automatically bullish for every chip stock. Definitely some weakness in AI stocks in the past couple of sessions and I've decided to flatten out current risk there - I sort of feel like there's a bigger and more exciting trade in crypto on the aforementioned narratives and going to investigate ways to play that with DATs/ETFs in the equity book.

BTC is slightly higher over 24H, with ETH up around 1.6%, SOL around 1.2% and HYPE up smalls. A modest bounce in the majors, altho the more noticeable strength is still in ZEC and VVV rather than BTC dragging everything higher. US spot BTC ETFs took in $21.1m on Friday, 9 October, after Thursday's $244.1m outflow. ETH ETFs lost $56.1m, versus $72.5m the day before. The selling eased, but Friday's small BTC inflow didn't do much to offset the rest of the week: $678.9m left BTC funds across the five sessions. Hard to call that a turn in demand yet. ZEC is up roughly 4.5% and VVV around 6% over 24H, comfortably ahead of the majors. That's the more useful contrast than trying to find a fresh story for every green candle. The price bounce is coming despite a weak week for ETF demand...the thing to watch is whether that relative strength survives once US trading gets going, rather than assuming one decent day means the selling is finished. A couple of recent big movers have been STRK (as the "tech" it uses makes it more AI resistant...talking extremely simple terms here) and W (as a lot of the tokenised stock action goes through it) - does go to show that there are probably a lot of interesting trades out there that continue to be overlooked. Good luck today.