Rekt Mkts: $6.3B Binance hack marks the largest ever in crypto

Right so obviously you have seen all the headlines...pretty mental but I wouldn't even call this a black swan event...because this is the new normal...we are only going to see hacks + security threats increase from here on and it's a rude awakening for those who are not on top of defending themselves, as DPRK are clearly ahead of the game on this stuff. In any case, I personally think it's almost imperative that your investment portfolio contains some exposure to "the resistance", whether it be cyber-security stocks or ZEC in crypto. Once again, once the dust settles, I expect these to come out of the woodworks and outperform. More thoughts below on price action in the crypto section.

A bit quieter on the macro front with this week's major events not really moving the needle in either direction. Treasuries are ending the week mostly unchanged, while oil is up ever so slightly. Call me a conspiracist but I still believe we could see some sort of positive headline over the weekend on the geopolitical front, and I also still feel like we are due to rally post the outcome of midterms next week. Today's activity will mostly be a wash for the market but I think the weekend price action on crypto perps for tradfi assets will be interesting.

S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures are lower, with tech taking the bigger hit. Amazon is down around 7% in premarket after missing revenue and earnings expectations, despite AWS sales growing 39.3%. Trailing twelve-month free cash flow fell to negative $42.4bn. Cloud demand is growing quickly, but that hasn't been enough to get shareholders comfortable with the cost of meeting it. Intel is down around 25% in premarket after its Q4 outlook fell short, with PC weakness weighing on the forecast. Korean memory has had a rough session too: SK Hynix finished down 7.1% and Samsung 3%. Hynix held onto its earnings rally in yday's brief; today it's giving a sizeable chunk back. Strong company numbers haven't insulated the shares from the wider selling. All in all, it feels like a flurry of nasty earnings in big tech which has caused some mega moves in equities that have been popular this year. For the long-term equity bags, it's looking like interesting points to buy dips imo.

BTC is down around 3.5% over 24H, with ETH and SOL each down 3.8%, while HYPE is up 4.6%. Binance estimates the impact at around $6.3bn, says roughly $3bn has been frozen and promises to cover all losses using SAFU and company funds. Withdrawals remain paused. Its initial investigation pointed to a possible compromised engineer's laptop, but it now says it has found additional points of breach. The full attack path is still being investigated, so the laptop explanation isn't the whole story. Honestly I am quite surprised by the price reaction - ie - we haven't seen things move down as much as I thought we would. Now, the main reason why is because it sounds like all funds will effectively be returned while Binance itself will absorb most of the hit. Secondly, the attack vector itself does not sound like it was specifically AI related, although the exact details are unclear. Either way, this isn't like 10/10 where tonnes of market participants experienced major losses; this is a situation where everyone should be made whole (or so they say)...but....it's obviously a massive hit to market confidence and has also led BTC to fall below its magical 80k support line. Unsurprisingly we're seeing coins like ZEC and XMR outperform; the ZECBTC ratio is up another 3% today to 0.016, marking a weekly increase of 8%. I expect this to continue, once again, I just don't see how the events of the last 24H are not bullish for ZEC...would you rather own something that is actively working on resistance or would you rather own something that is behind the curve and will be scrambling if they [eventually] get exploited? My gut says we see a repeat of last week where once the dust settles, ZEC surges out again. Let's see. Good luck and stay "SAFU".