First, the big question: How much is Bitcoin ($BTC) going for right now? Finnhub's live Binance price is $75,783, down 5.9% over 24 hours; CoinGecko has it at $76,028, down 5.8%. Both are hovering around $76,000.
So how far is it from MicroStrategy's cost basis? Its November 2 8-K spells it out: it holds 849,327 coins at an average cost of $75,451, for a total spend of about $64.1 billion. Subtract $75,783 from that and there's just $332 left; using CoinGecko's quote, it's only $577. Another half-step down, and the world's largest publicly traded corporate Bitcoin holder will have no unrealized gains left on paper.
MicroStrategy’s own share price couldn’t hold up: it closed down 9.29% on November 5 at $129.30. Its market cap is $54.99 billion, while the coins it holds are worth $64.51 billion—meaning the stock is trading at about a 15% discount.
Now, looking at 5 p.m. tonight: 33,135 Bitcoin options worth about $2.65 billion in notional value expire on Deribit. There are 24,912 calls and just 8,223 puts. The maximum pain price is $79,000—the price at which the most options expire worthless—and the current price is still $3,000 below it. Most calls are concentrated at strike prices of $82,000 and $85,000, so those who had bet on prices going up are now all underwater. Ethereum is the opposite: about $224.5 million worth of options expire, with a maximum pain price of $2,350. There are more puts than calls, with bears betting on $2,100. Ethereum is now at $2,241, down about 7.5%.
The options expire at 5 p.m., and the nonfarm payrolls report doesn’t come out until 9:30 p.m.—a 5.5-hour gap during which those options will already be off the table. The market expects about 65,000 jobs to have been added in October, compared with just 29,000 in September, and an unemployment rate of 4.2%. A strong jobs report would reinforce expectations of a rate hike in December; the market currently puts the odds at about 80%. A weak report would ease those expectations.
So tonight comes down to three things: whether $75,451 holds, how the options settle at 5 p.m., and what number the nonfarm payrolls report shows at 9:30 p.m.
