EQUOS — Morning Update — November 24th

Two interesting news items seemed to catch investors’ attention: 1. The continuous improvement in regards to Covid vaccines and their planned releases in the US and worldwide, and 2. Joe Biden’s plan to nominate former Fed Chair Janet Yellen to serve as his Treasury Secretary. Both bits of news were welcomed by Wall Street, but didn’t lead to massive moves.

The S&P is up less than 1%. The Nasdaq edged down slightly. The dollar rose somewhat along with treasury yields. The interesting — and more dramatic — move was gold, down more than 1.6%, breaking down the $1,860 support line.

In the crypto space, there was movement (there always seems to be, these days). In a previous briefing, we floated the idea that BTC would need to stagnate for a bit in order for alts to play catch up. It seems that this just happened.

BTC is closing flat (yet another doji candle), currently at $18,355. Alts, on the other hand, made a decided comeback. ETH boldly pushed through and past $600, up 8% on the day. To give a broader context, that pushes the year-to-date performance of ETH at about 360%.

ADA followed on a series of long green candles and added another 4% on the session. XLM finished the day up 23%. XTZ rose over 13%. XRP — a coin I don’t have a lot of affection for — blew past expectations, pumping 34% (and following even bolder moves over the weekend). The list goes on, but the picture remains more or less the same.

The BTC Dominance index is now down to 62.5, continuing a sharp descent from last week’s high at 68. It will be fascinating to see if investors now rotate back into the safety of BTC and lock in some gains or ride the alts’ momentum. In regards to BTC specifically, it was interesting to see the funding rate on BTC perps rise consistently over the past week (unsurprisingly, you might say) but, at a certain point, it might be too attractive to be short (and get that funding rate), and the pendulum could swing back.

Lastly, to end on more fundamental news: did you see PayPal’s CEO on CNBC explaining that they will allow cryptocurrencies to be a funding source for any transaction happening on all 28 million merchants? Big news.