Market Pulse (Week 30, 25/07/2022 – 01/08/2022)

Can BTC catch up with the NASDAQ 100? BTC and ETH put-call ratios drop sharply. ETH options skews are falling, indicating bidding intensity for calls.

Chart(s) of the Week: Catch Me if You Can

• BTC’s movement in lockstep with the NASDAQ 100 broke down in mid-June as the latter surged while BTC traded in a narrow range. However, BTC’s recent upside breakout has it playing some catch-up, although the gap still remains rather large. Meanwhile, ETH’s tag game with NASDAQ 100 has been better than BTC’s recently. Can BTC catch up further amid renewed risk-on appetite?

Fund Flow Tracker

• No notable changes in aggregated exchange balances for both BTC and ETH. The past week saw net-outflows of 1.7K for BTC and net-inflows of 394.4K for ETH.

Derivatives Pulse

• Implied vols fell to subdued levels during the past week. Skews (puts minus calls) are also down sharply, indicating calls are being bid up. 1-week implied vol currently stands at 68.4% (vs. 82.3% a week ago) and 95.2% (vs. 115.6% a week ago) for BTC and ETH, respectively. Put-call ratios dropped sharply for both BTC and ETH.

• Perpetual futures funding rates continue to print positive for both BTC and ETH over the past week, indicating long-positioning tilt.

• Leveraged traders’ (i.e. speculators) net-short position in CME Bitcoin futures continues to reduce.

• Leveraged traders are typically hedge funds and various types of money managers, including commodity trading advisors and commodity pool operators. The traders may be engaged in managing and conducting proprietary futures trading, and trading on behalf of speculative clients.

• The asset manager category consists of institutional investors, including pension funds, endowments, insurance companies, mutual funds, and those portfolio/investment managers whose clients are predominantly institutional.

• The dealer category consists of participants typically described as the “sell-side” of the market. These include large banks and dealers in securities, swaps, and other derivatives. The other reportable category consists of traders mostly using markets to hedge business risk, and includes amongst others corporate treasuries. 

Technically Speaking

• BTC’s upside breakout gets a few more notches on the belt, with a cross of the 50-day moving average, and a push above the trend-line that has been in place since March.

Price Movements

News Highlights

• U.S. Fed raises interest rates by 75 bps, in-line with market expectations.
• U.K. bank Barclays is taking a stake in Copper, a crypto custody firm, according to Sky News citing sources.
• Aptos Labs, a Layer 1 blockchain, raises U.S.$150M in a Series A funding round, from investors including FTX Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Circle Ventures.
• Zipmex, a Southeast-Asia focused crypto exchange, files for bankruptcy protection in Singapore.

Catalyst Calendar

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Author

Research and Insights team