EQUOS — Morning Update — November 3rd

With a pandemic, an election, and the risk of a global economic downturn, investors still turned risk-on yesterday. During the US session, energy, materials, and industrial sectors rose, the S&P went up 1.2%, but really only repairing massive losses in the past two weeks. Treasuries also rebounded slightly, but the 10-year yield is still above 0.85%. Gold, on the other hand, moved almost 1% up, back just below $1,900.

Naturally, election day is upon us and it’ll be interesting how clear or messy this gets. Most republicans will go to the polls, which may lead Trump to come out ahead early on — and declare himself the winner — while democrats are expected to have voted by mail, making the lead Biden could or could not have slower to see. If contested, the election might be dependent on the electoral or supreme court, and take the country into a polarizing state.

Looking at crypto — which tends to be a great refuge with political uncertainty anyway — we had a sharp intraday move down, all the way to $13,195 (-4.2%), but have since then recouped to close still in the red but at much higher levels, around $13,595.

The bad news that gripped the space was the rumor of Huobi’s senior executives being arrested — it later transpired that they in fact were not.

Alts also suffered — comparatively more so than BTC. ETH, LTC, BCH are down about 3% while more volatile coins like XMR, LINK, DASH, DOT all suffered moves of about -6% and have not recovered. For now, BTC Dominance remains around 63, after a solid ramp up from 57 back in September.

Lastly, an interesting chart to take a look at is the mining difficulty adjustment for miners and, with hashrates having dropped significantly in the past month, we’re looking at a -16% adjustment. Let’s see if the market reacts.