20th March 2024 > > Charades, ETFs, & BitMEX.

tl;dr

We face another charade of blatant market manipulation later today by the Fed. An industry leader confirms the CCC’s medium-term view of flows into spot BTC ETFs. Pain on BitMEX for some unexplainable actions.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Another night of BTC weakness and still the market is over-leveraged to the long side. This is getting ever so slightly ridiculous now. The costs of all those liquidations must be getting painful for some.

The Fed meets later today for its next bout of market manipulation when it decides the price of overnight interest rates.

For those who are still not convinced that it is wrong that this happens, try changing “overnight interest rates” to “milk” or “bread” and see how many people you can convince that would be a good idea. Sure, a few unreconstructed Marxists, such as the head of the WHO whose instant dismissal of the lab leak theory should have got him fired, Kim Jong-un, and the BBC’s economics editor, but that’s about it.

The wealth destruction caused by central bankers is vast.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Milk Road

This is just so true.

https://milkroad.com/subscribe/?ref=o5CmCFhBAK

Speculators (mostly) lose money. Investors make out like bandits.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – BTC ETF inflows

Vice-President of Carlson Group, Grant Englebart, has been interviewed on Bloomberg TV:

https://twitter.com/BloombergTV/status/1769796711843574166

Grant confirms two themes that the CCC keeps banging on about.

The first is that the adoption phase is only just beginning, with only a handful of advisors so far involved in these new ETFs. That number will continue to grow. He said that the firm took a month before allowing their own advisors to add ETFs to the recommended list, but that this timescale was “nimble”, the implication being that other advisory groups have not yet got around to it.

The second is one that I am very pleased about – for those households that are buying in, the allocation to spot BTC ETFs averages at 3.5% of their portfolio. I have long had a close to 5% target across all investment funds for BTC adoption. It is nice to see that starting to play out.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – BitMEX

Oh dear, a fat finger probably in the form of an automated trading code error has cost someone a lot of cash.

Repeated sales to a total of 977 BTC was met with much lower liquidity on BitMEX, driving the price of BTC on BitMEX to as low as $8,900 at one point. There was a period of ten minutes when BTC was significantly mispriced on this exchange:

For the entire three-hour duration of this selling spree, prices at BitMEX kept deviating lower in a material way from other markets. Anyone who got filled on those ridiculously cheeky bids are mightily pleased with themselves. For instance, one clip of 10 BTC at $40k, another 5 BTC and 14 BTC at the same print, and 10 BTC at $41k:

That is a good day at the office for the buyers.

(Source X: https://twitter.com/syq/status/1769861275524202742).