Morning‌‌ ‌‌Update‌‌ ‌‌-‌‌ ‌‌December‌‌ ‌‌18th‌‌ — Macro and Crypto Markets ‌ ‌

The S&P rose half a percent, the Nasdaq almost 1%, gold is up 1%, treasuries are closing where they opened.

Nothing is really that shocking or interesting, except maybe the dollar index which sank half a percent lower, in what seems to be an unstoppable descent. Conversely, crypto is just… wow.

During yesterday’s briefing, the all-time high was in the mid 21K -new, unheard of and a way above 20K. As I’m writing this the new allt-time high is $23,775. As someone said on Twitter, at this point 25K or 30K doesn’t even look that intimidating anymore.

That being said, we did retrace somewhat from those levels, currently BTC is at $22,700, so about $1000 lower. The session is still closing 6% up (while the previous session had closed almost 10% up). It’s interesting that the European and American session didn’t lift prices even higher although the day definitely experienced some wild intraday swings.

A quick word on alts: they’re not doing good. Any chart you’d look at with alts vs BTC is deep in the red, typically around 5–7% down. So while alts holders might be in the green on all holdings in USD terms, denominated in BTC, they’re not performing as well.

So what now? As mentioned yesterday, very hard to make short-term predictions. While the move speaks volume about the interest and growth potential of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, large players can move things one way or the other pretty fast, whether that means picking up alts or sinking them lower, or, forcing liquidations on some large derivatives exchanges.

The open interest on BTC Futures across exchanges hit $8 billion yesterday. There’s also a massive options expiry coming on Christmas day, worth about $1.9 billion; watch out for any volatility pre and post expiry.

Speaking of options, did you see that Deribit introduced a $100K strike for BTC Sep21 expiry?

Lastly, as a quick information nugget but also a significant bit of news, Coinbase is filing for an IPO.