4th November 2023 > > QE, memecoins, & LastPass.

tl;dr

The correlation of bond and stock markets tells us that market manipulation by governments on the grandest scale will soon be upon us. A portent of the death of memecoins, and probably not a moment too soon. A scam some need to be aware of.

Market Sna

Market Wrap

Open interest for the CME’s (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) BTC futures contract has hit an all-time high of $3.65bn, with the premium at a two-year high. This is likely indicative of institutional interest in advance of a spot BTC ETF. This probably explains why perpetual futures funding rates have been firmly grounded in the neutral zone at 0.01% since the 23rd of October 2023.

The weakening labour market in the US is the first real-life economic indicator to suggest that the 2s-10s inversion of 27bps, which has persisted for a year or more, cannot be ignored. Traditionalists will point to the stock market’s best weekly performance of the year as of last night’s close as a contradiction to the loud and clear recessionary signal from the bond market, but that is because they ignore the very real threat that QE is back on the agenda in short shrift.

10-year bonds have rallied nearly five points in just over a week, a trend that is set to accelerate. SIPP holders are greedily eyeing up a rebalancing in favour of fixed interest investments, whilst passive pension holders merely hope to partially recoup regulatory induced losses.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Memecoins are so over

OKX is listing a memecoin called MEME:

https://www.okx.com/help/okx-to-list-memecoin-meme-for-spot-trading

That is the end of that party.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – LastPass

A very welcome and cheering trend of 2023 has been the reduction in scams and hacks, especially outside of the DeFi world, a world which is only inhabited by the few.

But the feral scumbags have not gone away, so please heed this warning.

LastPass – an online platform for storing encrypted passwords and, yes, private keys – was hacked last year. Just last week, 25 LastPass users lost $4.4mm of cryptos:

https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1717901088521687330

@zachxbt does a great job of tracking stolen crypto assets and has been personally responsible for the restitution of many of those assets. So, when he says these words of wisdom, please do not ignore them:

“Cannot stress this enough, if you believe you may have ever stored your seed phrase or keys in LastPass migrate your crypto assets immediately.”