Topic: nrd525 Market Tracker - page 5. (Read 83088 times)

Looks like Covid19 cases (testing positive) in the US might have just peaked on Friday. Or it will peak this next week.

Estimated cases > tested positive. Nationally the real peak was in March/April due to the 100k/day cases in NY.  At least so far.

Not sure what Bitcoin is doing at 9700. I'm still bearish. It'll be interesting to see the US Q2 GDP number on Friday. Probably -25% (quarter on quarter, annualized), but could be as little as -15%.  I recently saw The Economist Intelligence Unit only predicting -8% - which is very weird (unless they aren't annualizing it, aka multiplying it by four, but their FAQ says they do annualize it).

If Trump sends troops into major US cities, he will spark a wave of unrest that might even dwarf the George Floyd uprisings (though probably not - it'd also be a lot more concentrated in major cities, whereas the George Floyd / BLM protests reached thousands of US communities, including some very small towns). It could also shake up the election either in his favor or Biden. Hard to say.   Nixon benefited in 1968 from riots, but now it is white people rioting.

YFI offers a 600% APR and doesn't have a major use case. Providing liquidity?  That's what people thought Bitcoin Savings and Trust was doing!  At best it'd be worth a 20% APR.

What is the scam?
(Based on very little research it sure looks like one).

Sidenote: there is a bias towards the pro-scam/pro-ponzi arguments/people. As they have a lot of money to gain if they can get suckers to "invest".  But on the other hand there are very few incentives to take the opposing side as it is difficult to impossible to short the scams or to find people to take escrowed bets.  If you challenge a project for being a scam, you will be attacked much harder than the likely scammers.

That's true, and it's working for Europe.

In the US, there are two problems with this approach. For one thing, a huge portion of Americans opposes wearing masks (almost as much as they oppose the idea of a getting a corona virus vaccine). Secondly, everybody is obviously against more lockdowns, but everything keeps going up. Infections, hospital cases, deaths. If this keeps up, more lockdowns are pretty much guaranteed, and Trump has no power to stop that.

And if the US starts locking down again, there will be another global demand shock. When America sneezes the world catches a cold, and all that.

I think people are reluctant to do more lockdowns, and really we just need everyone to start wearing masks and that'd be enough to keep things at a non-crazy level.  I really don't know why the government isn't mass manufacturing n95s or even n100s -- or at least something better than these masks that people are wearing that are only 70% or less effective.  If you get someone to wear one of those it makes up for a person who doesn't wear a mask (something like 30% of the people in Philadelphia, maybe more).

I just learned about polymarket, in beta, using USDC on Ethereum. They have some interesting covid19 markets.  Has anyone tried them?
https://www.poly.market/markets/coronavirus

I think it's pretty clear that we'll have more measured cases in the US in Q3 than in Q2.  Not so sure about actual cases though, and thus deaths also might be lower in Q3. The verdict is still out on how many cases we'll get a day. Will we hit a 7 day average of 100k in about 3-5 weeks?  The trend is up and we're definitely going to have days that hit 80k-100k new cases.  But Fridays tend to have far more cases than the weekly average, so it is better to take a 7 day (or 14 day) average.

So I've read, but Tether is still just a drop in the bucket compared to the overall market for capital flight.


Do you think governors will bring back full blown lockdowns? I assume that'll send the markets tumbling.


Probably. I'm not too worried about it. Price action is everything.

First, investors and traders accumulate, then price gets marked up, and then retail no-coiners will start chasing the price. That's when Google trends kicks in.

Is there a significant part of Chinese demand for Tether to avoid currency controls?

If not, maybe large corporations and rich people already have a good way of getting around them or maybe they aren't as serious as I thought they were.

...

Covid19 - it's interesting how what matters the most is the number of Actual Cases, not the number of positive tests.  If the models that are estimating cases are good (and I have no reason to believe they are not), those are the numbers we should be using to make decisions and the media should be focussed on those.  For instance, NY state peaked at an estimated 100k/cases per day.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/new-york

However it is safe to say that data scientists won't win the argument on this one, and we may see greater panic in the financial markets as the daily positive tests hit records in the US (50k+).  As with enough testing, and inadequate distancing - we could easily hit 100k/day.  Though so far the stock market and bitcoin are both holding strong.  It will be interesting to see if they hold up in the next two months.

...

Bitcoin search trend is down with June at a "14".  Though it might be the lack of price action. In March we had the crash, and in May we recovered to the pre-crash level.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=bitcoin

It's mainly China.

I found this informative: Chinese investors secretly buying Bitcoin helped fuel Tether’s $5 billion surge

The basic idea is, supposedly, Chinese speculators (including institutional investors) are increasingly entering the BTC market. Because of the ban on Bitcoin exchanges and the implicit ban on BTCCNY trading (it'll get your bank account closed), speculators buy USDT on the OTC market from brokers who source it from exchanges. Then they use it for trading. This is apparently why there is such deep liquidity on China-facing USDT exchanges like Binance and Huobi.



I found this particularly interesting:

Sidenote: if anyone wants to put their statistics and/or strategic mind to work - I recommend AxisandAllies.org - and playing me (and others) in Axis and Allies Global 1940 Edition. You can play for free using free software (TripleA)!  The game is very challenging. Addmittedly there is a sharp learning curve, but it is a lot of fun (and our small community could use some more players).  It's like Chess with statistics (or 100x better than Risk).  I've been playing various editions of Axis and Allies for thirty years on and off. 

We have a small League that is pretty friendly!  So while I might be taking out your capital, I'll be nice about it =)

Can people in China have relatively easy access to convert their money (Yuan) into Tether?

Tether going from $4.6 billion market cap (March 29) to $9.2 billion (now) is a lot!

Any other idea who is using it?  There is probably growing lending with it, but not $4 billion worth.

Very interesting indeed. I've been operating under the assumption that if/when the stock markets crash again that BTC will follow. The question is are we seeing the beginnings of that, or just short term chop?

I'm concerned what this VIX breakout means for stocks:



That last VIX rally in February-March was the big crash. Looks ominous to me.

Ooh that is good news about Purse.  Just after I liquidate my Purse holdings (around $15) and spend 20% of it on the withdrawal fee (I sold the bottom)!  It took support a while to figure out that their claimed 0.0003 mbtc withdrawal fee is actually 0.0003 btc.  They were like "but we don't see any withdrawals from your account in the past x days".  And I'm saying "do you really expect me to believe you are charging 0.3 cents for withdrawal?, ok here is the screenshot".

Some nice correlation between the stock market (down approx 5.5%) and BTC (down 10%, and then up 3%) today. 

Supposedly a few million jobs were created last month. I assume you're talking about initial jobless claims? Some of those people have gone back to work since they originally filed.


I'm with you but I'm also open to the possibilities that the deflation fears were overblown, or that the market can remain irrational for a quite a while based on Fed/Treasury liquidity injections.


I think they got bought and are no longer shutting down.
https://support.purse.io/en/articles/3851246-closing-down
https://twitter.com/PurseIO/status/1267538635810881539

NASDAQ is up 3% on its Feb 2020 peak.

Do we have any good survey data or analysis on demographics of who is buying most of the bitcoins?  I'm guessing this might still elude us as it'd be difficult to get a random sample.  I'm interested in what jobs people have and how much of it is dominated by people whose main job is "investor" - so they aren't directly impacted by the main street economy.

Fed is saying 0% interest rates through end of 2022.  Inflation a modest 1%-2% for the next couple years (I'm kind of surprised that we're aren't going negative this year, but maybe wages and other prices are too sticky).  GDP forecast at -6.5% for 2020.

I'm puzzled by the disparity between jobless claims and the unemployment rate. Even after correcting for the way unemployment is counted (which increases it by 3% in April if I recall), it still seems like we should have hit 20%-26% (methodology: add jobless claims above standard amount, divide by total labor force and add previous unemployment rate).  But maybe it was only very briefly and thus didn't appear in the monthly average or maybe there was a TON of job creation as the jobs that were lost came back (employer payment protection plan, etc)?

Bitcoin 9880.  SP500 at 3200. It's a good thing I didn't try to short stocks!  My Democrat long / Republican short is going well on PredictIt, as the Democrats are at a 59%-60% chance of winning the 2020 election (I bought in around 52%). 

Currently still waiting for bitcoin and the stock market to realize we're in a recession.  I guess it's possible that bitcoin investors are more into tech stocks (and less likely to own part or all of a small business) and thus outperforming the rest of the stock market, let alone economy.  Though the real economy ought to have some impact. And the bitcoin economy should take a fair sized hit from the loss of conferences (probably not the conferences themselves so much as the business deals that get made as a result of networking).

Why is Purse.io closing? It seems like someone would buy them up. Unless they were ordered to close down.

At least you're honest about it.

I don't want to get too comfortable either way. On one hand, bulls look really strong. On the other hand, we've still got a years worth of lower highs and lower lows. Need to break that structure and hold above $10.5K before celebrating. The stock market is also showing weakness, which could weigh BTC down.

We're close to an inflection point. Failure here (or on one more try up) could bring a months-long bearish consolidation. On the other hand, breaking the $10.5K resistance will trigger lots of stops and signify a classical trend break.

I like this, probably because it fits my bearish bias:
https://medium.com/exg/the-bitcoin-halving-is-not-a-buy-b55ae9fb0e58

The polls said Clinton had an 80% chance of winning and they were right. Margin of error y'all.

Last time someone was re-elected US president with over 8% unemployment was FDR. And we're going to have 10%-12% in November.  Of course this is just one variable.

Biden sucks, is likely guilty of sexual assault (among other crimes - see politicians) and I probably won't vote for him, but he is beating Trump in the early polls including in most swing states.

There is an international "crisis" boost to many governing parties, including Italy, UK, France, Germany, etc.  However they are likely to be short-lived. US examples include Carter 1980 (Iran Crisis), George Bush Sr (Persian Gulf War 1991), and George W Bush (Sept 11, 2001).

https://news.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ratings-gallup-historical-statistics-trends.aspx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_George_W._Bush

Meanwhile - the Halving / Infinite QE pump continues with Bitcoin at 9400.  Apparently you cannot get the coronavirus from using the blockchain =)

Be careful. Crises are always good for presidential job approval, and this crisis can easily continue into the election. Earlier this month, Trump's approval numbers hit levels not seen since early 2017 when he took office. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

Biden is also a terrible candidate. The guy can barely get through an interview coherently. The only things going for him: he's a corporate pandering centrist (much less threatening to the establishment than Bernie Sanders) and he makes people nostalgic for Obama.

The next few months are very unpredictable. We don't know if an effective treatment will be found. We don't know when or in what manner the economy will be reopened. We don't know what stimulus or relief packages will be passed. And remember last election? All the polls said Hilary was going to win, then Donald took it down.

I feel much more comfortable shorting bear markets than political parties.

Instead of shorting the stock market, so far I'm shorting the Republicans by betting on the Democrats winning the presidential 2020 election on PredictIt.  Odds are 50/50 which seems wrong.  The last time an incumbent was elected with over 8% unemployment was FDR.  I'm guessing unemployment is going to peak at 22%-28%, and will probably be 12%-15% going into the fall election.  Incumbency is very powerful in the US electoral system, but it's going to be hard to hold up to the biggest recession / first depression since the Great Depression.

Even if the virus is mostly responsible for the devastation. My guess is the Democrats would have saved more lives by doing a bit stronger of a quarantine, but also hurt the economy a bit more (maybe less if they got lucky with early containment).

"Our bottom line: We find no systematic evidence of stable coin issuance driving cryptocurrency prices. We do find, in contrast, evidence of alternative hypotheses for the drivers of issuance. Specifically, (i) stable coin issuance endogenously responds to deviations of the secondary market rate from the pegged rate and (ii) stable coins perform a significant role in the digital-asset economy as a safe haven. This can be seen, for example, in the significant premiums during the COVID-19 panic of March 2020."


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=671764.1080

I'd like to see these researchers engage with each other's research and data as we are seeing conflicting results.  For instance this report (which is rather short btw) finds that
"Using our more precise measure of Tether flow to the secondary market, we find no significant effect on prices of major non-stable crypto currencies (Figure 3). This result is robust to the choice of sample period – including the late 2017 period in which Bitcoin prices surged – and holds for other major stable coins as well.("

Which is the exact opposite of what a previous study found.