I watched the PPI hour hoping for a rescue. It came — and it lasted about sixty minutes.
October PPI printed cooler than expected at 13:30 UTC: headline +0.3% month-on-month against +0.4% expected, 6.5% year-on-year against 6.6%. Core PPI landed exactly on forecast, +0.3% on the month and +5.0% on the year. The first reaction was what bulls wanted. $BTC jumped from about $69,246 to nearly $70,000 in five minutes and briefly topped $70,200 on Binance. ETH spiked from $1,959 to $1,989 in the same hour.
Then the whole move unwound. The morning had already tagged $1,900 before the print even landed — $1,895.95, the lowest since 18 August. By 15:00 UTC ETH was back at $1,934, and it is around $1,949 now, still under $2,000. Yesterday's daily close was $2,019.74, so tonight's close is shaping up to be the first under $2,000 since August. The cooler print bought one hour. That is the whole story of this market right now.
Here is why the bounce failed. CoinGlass counted $1.64B of liquidations in 24 hours, 88.7% of them longs. ETH alone took $289M of it, 89.5% longs. That means the break under $2,000 was a forced unwind of leveraged longs, not a spot exit. And the PPI hour itself was a short squeeze, not buying: $39M of the $41M liquidated in that hour were shorts, and one Hyperliquid trader's $52M short sat under 2% from a forced exit. Squeezes fade. This one faded in an hour.
The sellers are not stopping either. US spot ETH ETFs have now lost $695.9M between 1 and 11 November, including $144.8M on 11 November alone, $129.8M of it from BlackRock's ETHA. And while traders waited for a bounce, a wallet linked to the Ethereum Foundation sold another 2,000 ETH, about $3.87M, and a whale swapped 16,700 ETH for $30.94M in USDT. Nobody with size is catching this knife yet.
And the "cooler" in cooler PPI deserves a second look. The annual rate is 6.5%, still the highest since November 2022, up from 6.3% in September. Inflation did not cool; the monthly pace just slowed. Stocks did not buy it either: the S&P 500 fell 1.2% and the Nasdaq 1.5%. A 25-basis-point December hike is still fully priced, and the 50-point odds only trimmed, not gone.
My stance is leaning bearish, and only leaning because the structure under $2,000 is broken — ETH sits about $270 under its 20-day average of $2,220 — but this is also the most crowded short in weeks, and the PPI hour showed how fast $39M of shorts can burn. A reclaim of $2,000 on a daily close flips me back to neutral and opens $2,060, the floor ETH lost on 10 November. What would prove me wrong is exactly that: a daily close back above $2,000 with ETF flows turning positive.
The levels are simple now. If $1,900 holds into tonight's close, this was a flush. If it breaks and the daily close lands under $1,900, $1,833 is next, then $1,800. If $2,000 is reclaimed first, the breakdown call is dead, and I will own that in the next post.
So the trigger is tonight's close, not the next headline. $ETH closes under $2,000 tonight: are you buying the $1,900 tag, or waiting for $1,833? Drop your number — I am reading every reply.
Data: Binance spot, 19:30 UTC; PPI via BLS, 13:30 UTC; liquidations via CoinGlass/CoinDesk; ETF flows via Farside Investors.
Not financial advice. DYOR.