Today was a fascinating, and slightly scary day. The Fed did it's monthly CPI inflation rate announcement, and it made for pretty grim reading. The headline inflation rates were 8.2% for the past 12 months, and 0.4% for September.

The reality is that it wasn't actually that much worse than analysts had expected. After a monthly inflation rate of 0.1% in August, the September figure had been predicted to be 0.2% to 0.3%.

But you would think that 0.1% to 0.2% difference was the end of civilisation as we know it. I fully appreciate that inflation is a major headache for hard working families around the world right now. But honestly, the difference between the expected (awful) figure and the actual (slightly more awful) one wasn't that great.

The reaction of the stock market was quite interesting; the S&P 500 dropped sharply by around 2%, although the Dow Jones only dropped a little. I wonder if this reflects the more political nature of the larger corporations making up the S&P 500 ?

Crypto also had a hard time today. Bitcoin (the one we all love to quote when we're talking about crypto price movements !) started the day at around $19100. When the Fed announcement came in, it plunged to about $18130. Ouch !

HIVE has spent the last week bobbing around between $0.51 and $0.54. With the Fed announcement, it dropped to $0.46, although interestingly it was a slower decent than BTC.

Both stock markets and crypto recovered a little, and staggered along for a few hours at those kind of bottoms. But towards the end of the day (my time here in the UK, so I guess early afternoon American time) both stock markets and crypto had recovered very nicely, with HIVE back to $0.49 and Bitcoin actually higher than it started at around the $19400 mark.

When I saw the news of the drops, I didn't think it was the end of the world at all - I saw it as a great opportunity to buy some crypto while it was cheap !

I'm still a bit primitive about my crypto buying. I don't have snazzy tools to do it for me, I just see what the price is and hit the button if I like it. So I recognise that although I can buy the dip, I'm never going to time it exactly right, and I'm fine with that.

Taking a bit of time out of a thoroughly busy work day, I was able to move a little fiat around and buy a bit each of BTC and HIVE. Not large amounts (I wish I had that kind of money !) but still using a good chunk of the budget I allow myself each month. I got some BTC at $18390, and some HIVE at $0.47.

Considering the end of day prices, I'm pretty happy with that. I didn't spend so much that it would be a problem if they'd continued dropping, and didn't quite catch the falling knife, but I reckon that I did okay for an amateur.

Of course, the real truth is that just like when you buy a house, the value of crypto only actually matters when you come to sell it. In the meantime, you just stick it in cold storage or take a calculated risk and get it making interest for you. Trying to catch a falling knife is just a nice little bonus, and a fun game to keep you on your toes !

This post originally posted by me in LeoFinance.