BTC spot ETF officially approved
ETH’s volatility index is still at a high of 68.57, reaching a high of 73 last night; #BTC’s has fallen to 60.9.
With Japanese wage growth falling short of expectations (-3% y/y vs -2% expected), the global dovish turn continues, with markets now pricing the BoJ more likely to end its negative rate policy closer to September than April; the yen fell back to 146, the Nikkei index climbed to a 35-year high, on the verge of surpassing its much-maligned "bubble era" highs, and Japanese stocks have again outperformed this year, up nearly 5% and around 1.5% after adjusting for currency, far outperforming other developed markets (U.S. flat, Europe -1.7%, China -5.5%).
Most asset classes were trading very well, but asset price movements were contained by a lack of market moving data and as traders made some last minute positioning ahead of today’s CPI release; Fed’s Williams tried to deliver some hawkish messages on balance sheet reduction, saying “we do not appear to be close” to the point where the FOMC “stops shrinking the balance sheet” and that “to fully achieve our goals, I expect we will need to maintain tight policy for some time, and only when we are confident that inflation continues to move toward our 2% target will it be appropriate to reduce the degree of tightening of policy”, however, markets have been completely immune to these deliberate attempts to tighten financial conditions, with market pricing reflecting a 70% chance of a rate cut in March.
In addition, similar to the comments of PIMCO we mentioned earlier, more and more large financial institutions have made it clear that the rate cut in 2024 is expected to exceed expectations. JPM believes that a 150 basis point rate cut is only the "base scenario". If the economic situation is bad, the rate cut will be "much larger than this"; after the Fed's turn, will we see Wall Street's turn and subsequent follow-up? The CPI released today will be a key part of this narrative, depending on how the final data turns out (the market expects the core CPI to increase by 0.3% month-on-month, and the service industry is expected to be strong, but it will be offset by weak commodity prices).
On the cryptocurrency front, the U.S. SEC finally approved the first batch (11) of qualified spot ETFs, including products from Blackrock, ARk 21, Fidelity, Invesco, and VanEck, in a decidedly close 3-2 vote, with SEC Chairman Gensler casting the deciding vote in favor and Republican members voting against.
Of course, the SEC chairman will not let this decision fade gently into the night. In his statement, he reiterated that "there is no approval or endorsement of bitcoin", and said that bitcoin is still "mainly a speculative, volatile asset that is also used for illegal activities." He also said that today's approval "does not mean that the Commission is willing to approve the listing standards for crypto asset securities", in case the market is unclear about his true feelings on this issue.
The price trend is relatively calm. The spot price of BTC is still below $47,000. There is not a lot of news-driven fluctuations or FOMO emotions. Perhaps the "hacked" tweets the previous day have released a lot of gamma risks in advance; as the focus turns to ETH Spot ETF, ETH performed relatively well yesterday after a long period of underperformance relative to BTC.
We warmly welcome all of our TradFi friends to join the world of cryptocurrency, and we hope you all stay for a long time!
You can search SignalPlus in the Plugin Store of ChatGPT 4.0 to get real-time encryption information. If you want to receive our updates immediately, please follow our Twitter account @SignalPlus_Web3, or join our WeChat group (add assistant WeChat: xdengalin), Telegram group and Discord community to communicate and interact with more friends.
SignalPlus Official Website：https://www.signalplus.com
