Morning‌‌ ‌‌Update—February 8th —Macro and Crypto Markets

By Justin d'Anethan | Daily Market Update | 8 Feb 2021

With progress on the US stimulus front, hopes of a continuing recovery with vaccines coming out, and last week’s positive earnings from large companies, markets felt and continue to feel risk-on. This week, further earnings are due to come out, namely: Cisco, Twitter, Uber, MGM, GM, Coca-Cola, and Disney.

The S&P reached record highs on Friday. The VIX has been going down and now is retesting very low levels. With the dollar retreating, it was nice to see gold make a come-back, rising over 1%.

Benefiting from the risk-on tilt and the dollar’s weakness, BTC rose. The intraday high on Saturday took us to $40,955, just inches away from the all-time high. On Sunday, though, sellers piled on and pushed prices back down to 37,350. We’re now closing the Sunday session at $39,000.

Over the weekend, the global Bitcoin futures OI hit $14 billion for the first time ever.

While the focus was on BTC, alts didn’t do too well. They were mostly up in USD terms, but losing relative to Bitcoin. You can actually see the BTC Dominance index edge down to the 60 level and then pick back up to 62.

Something that is growing and supportive of the whole space is the stablecoin market cap. You can see a CoinMetrics chart just below for USDC. It is important to note that, while USDC is gaining market share, the picture is the same for other USD equivalents: up! Naturally, we can see subsequent large inflows of stablecoins to major exchanges.

Another great chart, this time from Glassnode, shows the liquid supply of BTC (as opposed to just showing the number of Bitcoins in existence) and, as one could’ve guessed, it’s not going up, showing that while new Bitcoins are being mined, a number of coins have been lost, and other haven’t moved for a decade. With limited supply, it’s no wonder that prices are rising.

Lastly, the CME Ether futures started trading at 6pm on Sunday, with the very first trade going through. Let’s see how big the institutional interest in ETH will be.

Cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) Crypto Ethereum (ETH) Crypto News

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Justin d'Anethan

Head of Exchange Sales at EQONEX. Passionate about financial markets, long-term investments, the occasional short-term trade and disruptive technologies.

Daily Market Update

A quick market update (1-2min read). Every week day, morning in Asia, I go over major moves in macro and crypto markets, linking fundamentals to price action.

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