Another very quiet session ahead of the good Friday holidays, with global markets holding close to yesterday’s levels. US treasuries and FX treaded water for the most part, while US stocks were headed for the same fate before an aggressive late-day selling futures took prices to close at the lows. With March quarter end taking place on a rare Thursday, expect the next 2 days of action to be rebalancing driven, with no significant data nor economic release due on the docket for the rest of the week.
While institutional investors are taking a break, retail users have been busy with their share of total options volume hitting an all-time high earlier this year. The excitement helped push average daily options volume in February to its highest on-record, with former President Trump’s SPAC deal the latest recipient of the retail inflows with the stock climbing 16% to an improbably $8bln valuation after the 1st day of trading. Who says only crypto gets to have fun with meme-coins?
In crypto, BTC is back to the $70k area after struggling over the past week with continued selling from GBTC. Outflows have slowed down with the net inflow back in balance, though March is still shaping up to be a very healthy month with nearly $3.9bln in net inflows MTD.
Elsewhere, regulators are back in the news with CFTC filing a suit against Kucoin, accusing them of illegally dealing in off-exchange commodity futures and margined transactions and without registering themselves a regulated swap execution facility (SEF). Most interestingly, however, is that the CFTC had decided to call BTC/ETH and stablecoins “commodities” in its official indictment, in direct contrast to their good friends at the SEC who still insist that everything ex-BTC is a “security”. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could just play nice for once?
