Last week in the news
The market star of the previous week were US Treasury bonds, which continued with drop in prices, reaching 16 year lows, in an aim to adjust to the new Fed narrative. Equities were trying to adjust to this new sentiment on bonds, but still finished the week in green territory. The crypto market continues to be side traded, while gold was adjusting to new US Dollar highs. This could be a short summary of the previous week on financial markets.
The US equity markets reacted positively on posted jobs figures on Friday, although, not all analysts are of the same opinion regarding the reason for this increase. The unemployment rate remained flat at 3.8% in September, although the markets were expecting to see 3.7%. At the same time, non-farm payrolls were significantly above market estimates of 170K, reaching a figure of 336K new jobs in September. Regardless of continuously strong jobs data, wage increases slowed down a bit in September, providing some relaxation to market participants that the effect of the job market on inflation will not be significant. Average hourly earnings were up by 0.2% in September, standing at 4.2% on a yearly basis. On the other side are several analysts who are noting that Friday`s surge in equity markets is a result of its heavy oversold side during September, as well as, a modest easing in US Treasury yields.
Fed`s Governor Michelle Bowman, noted her standing that interest rates should be increased further on next FOMC meeting. She repeated this on Connecticut Bankers Association during the previous week. She also commented on Friday`s job figures as “solid”. As per CME Group`s tracker, market participants are currently anticipating 43% probability that the Fed will increase rates before the end of this year.
FundStart, a company specialized in analysis, posted a report which revealed that the venture capital funding for projects within the crypto industry dropped by 75% on a yearly basis in Q3 this year. This also represents a six consecutive quarterly drop within this area.
Tokenized US Treasury bonds will be offered on the Coinbase exchange. This was announced by Backed Finance, a Switzerland based company, which specializes in asset tokenization. Since this product is issued under Switzerland`s tokenized securities law, it could be offered only to companies which follow the know-your-customer and anti-money laundering rules. The tokenization businesses are gaining in popularity, and could reach a market capitalization of $16 trillion in 2030, as noted by the Boston Consulting Group report.
Crypto market cap
The US Treasury bonds were the ones that collected market attention during the previous week. Their drop in prices intensified after the latest FOMC meeting, where Fed Chair Powell introduced a new Fed`s narrative called “higher for longer”. The stronger adjustment to this new narrative was conducted during the previous week, where the 10Y US Treasury benchmark rate reached the highest level at 4.88%. While equities were also moving within a correction path, still, on Friday they managed to make a bit of an upside move, during the easing of Treasury yields uptrend. During this period, the crypto market remained short at a side of investors interest, ending the week relatively flat, with a modest increase of total crypto market capitalization of 1.3% on a weekly basis, adding total $ 14B to the market cap. Daily trading volumes are still relatively low and were moving around $ 41B during the previous week, a modest drop from 56B traded a week before. Total crypto market capitalization increase since the beginning of this year currently stands at 42%, where it has added total 316B to the market cap.
Bitcoin was the one that drove a market cap up $ 14B during the previous week. BTC added a total of 18.4B to its cap, or around 3.5%. Other coins were traded in a mixed manner. Ether finished the week in red, losing 2.5% on a weekly basis, or around 5B. Coins with solid performance during the week were Solana, which increased its market cap by 8.6%, Polygon also managed to increase its value by 6.6%, while Monero was up by 4.4% on a weekly basis. Bitcoin Gold also gained during the week, adding a little bit less than 4% to its market cap. Coins which finished the week in red were LINK, with a drop in value of 7.7%, DASH was down by 6.2%, Theta lost 4.6%, while Ethereum Classic decreased its value by 5.9%. There have also been some movements within circulating coins. Algorand gained the most coins in circulation during the previous week, increasing it by 1%, and was followed by Filecoin, with an increase of 0.7%, and Solana by 0.3%. At the same time, Polkadot decreased its circulating coins by 0.2%.
Crypto futures market
The crypto futures market was following developments on the spot market during the previous week. BTC short term futures were last traded higher around 4%, while longer term ones were traded relatively flat. BTC futures maturing in December this year ended the week at price $28.495 or 4.42% higher from previous week`s close. There has not been much change with prices of futures maturing in December next week, as they were closed at $30.185 or 0.12% higher on a weekly basis. It is positive for BTC that it managed to hold a price above 30K for the year ahead.
Opposite to BTC, ETH` short term futures were traded between 1.4% and 3.3% lower from the week before. Futures maturing in December this year closed the week at price $1.634 or 3.37% lower on a weekly basis. Those futures maturing in December next year were down by 3.07% and were last traded at price $1.736. Positive for ETH is that those futures are still managing to hold prices above 1.7K for the four weeks.