Rekt Mkts: Stocks bounce, crypto edges up. Friday forgotten?

Despite all the FinTwit/CT chatter of a Black Monday, we're seeing a better start for stocks, a slightly quieter one for crypto with BTC is edging higher. I continue to be more bullish on crypto than equities here and it's not surprising to see a bounce today but I'm curious to see how long it lasts - either way I think we are going to be rangebound until after midterms.

WTI futures are around $97.66, down 3.7%, while gold futures are around $4,185, barely higher. The 10Y is around 5.07%, roughly 2.8bps below Friday's 5.098% close. Some relief, altho borrowing costs above 5% are still pretty uncomfortable the longer they are sustained there. The US easing sanctions on Russia has raised expectations of more oil supply. Attacks on Russian energy infrastructure and tankers in the Persian Gulf still complicate that picture...today's decline isn't proof the supply risks are sorted. China's Q3 GDP grew 4.5% year on year against 4.4% expected and 4.3% in Q2. A modest beat, with exports doing more of the work than consumer spending. It may reduce the pressure for extra stimulus, rather than give markets a reason to expect a sudden boom in domestic demand. I would say we have a better geopolitical backdrop today with constructive prices to support it.

S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures are higher, with tech leading the recovery, with the latter up 1.3%. Samsung finished up around 1.2% in Korea and SK Hynix 0.4%. Some buying in memory after last week's selling, altho those are modest moves rather than a dramatic reversal. The US cash open still has to test how much appetite there is to buy the dip. Meta and Tesla are among the companies reporting this week. Meta finished Friday down around 3.7%, so its spending plans and revenue outlook land in a less forgiving market. More capex could support suppliers while making Meta shareholders less comfortable with the eventual return...both can be true. Revenue growth that helps pay for the buildout would be a more useful answer than another bigger spending number on its own. It definitely feels a bit squeezy to me and I would suspect a lot of the AI names (neoclouds, memory etc) that got smoked last week and were probably heavily shorted can squeeze at the open...what's more important I guess is how they end up closing on the day and if we see heavy selling into strength.

BTC is up roughly 0.7% over 24H, ETH 0.4%, SOL 1% and HYPE 0.7%. A much quieter picture than Friday's bounce. Crypto has obviously outperformed equities a decent amount and once again the magical 80k level has held and we've bounced off it again. My gut says that if we have a strong cash open we can see some more aggressive upwards price action as it feels rather shorted to me - particularly in alts. US spot BTC ETFs lost $82.4m on Friday, 16 October, reversing Thursday's small inflow. ETH ETFs lost $69.7m, their third consecutive day of outflows. The full week finished with $228.4m leaving BTC funds and $320.1m leaving ETH funds. Better PA hasn't yet come with a convincing turn in demand from those funds. VVV is up around 6.2% over 24H, while ZEC is up 1.2%. Both are ahead of BTC, but VVV is making the clearer move. The AI-related and privacy names discussed on Friday aren't following through equally. STRK is down around 6.1%, so there is still some fairly nasty selling away from the majors rather than a recovery lifting everything together. Good luck today.