> “In a sense, the market is going to take that as kind of bullish.”
I mean everything is a bit oversold right now on negative emotions, both in the crypto space and in the stock markets.
There's probably going to be a positive bounce just because markets don't move in straight lines.
There is always the chance that something else explodes due to stress tomorrow and hits the headlines and crypto and/or stocks start melting down again (nothing is ever a sure bet), but it feels like we're closer to hitting a point of selling exhaustion and an inflection point of negative sentiment.
The fact that crypto is correlated with tech stock valuations should be raising eyebrows. Flash back a few years and the hypothesis that bitcoin would hedge inflation/fiat depreciation was standard. If BTC is correlated with equities, why not just hold productive equities?
I never understood the argument why crypto was a good store of value. Sure, it’s an ingenious new transactional system, making global payments mostly frictionless, etc, but that’s true whether the value of 1 Bitcoin is $1 or $50,000. If everyone’s just converting back to fiat anyway, only keeping enough BTC transiently to settle transactions, why hold it long term?
Well it's actually a pretty bad transactional currency because it costs so much to transfer btc. So it's kinda the opposite, where people mostly hold it instead of transacting. The argument for a store of value is that of gold but easier to store and transfer, better security etc.. Whether it's a good one is for you to judge.
That's not true. The typical credit card processing fee ranges from about 1.3% to 3.5%. Average international remittance fees are about 7%. For comparison the average Bitcoin fee is about $1 right now, so 1% on a $100 transaction. So Bitcoin compares favorably to its competitors.
1) why are you comparing to credit cards? The average ACH transfer costs zero dollars.
2) why did you pick $100 as your basis? If I try to buy a $5 sandwich in Bitcoin and have to pay 20% transaction fee that is not a good platform for transactions.
I like some parts of crypto, but transaction fees on most coins right now are not one of those parts.
> 1) why are you comparing to credit cards? The average ACH transfer costs zero dollars.
As far as I understand ACH doesn't work globally
> 2) why did you pick $100 as your basis? If I try to buy a $5 sandwich in Bitcoin and have to pay 20% transaction fee that is not a good platform for transactions.
Or use lightning and pay a fraction of a cent transaction fee
Ahh, Lightning. The network that is simultaneously "here and available and usable, right now" when convenient, and "still a few years away", when that argument is convenient.
So for that bitcoin fee, I get fraud protection too? So as a consumer I can challenge a fraudulent charge? And the money, it doesn’t leave my account until I say so? Oh wait no? I get none of those guarantees? Just a “good luck! Buyer beware!”
No thank you. I’ll stick with my credit card. If I want to pay for something semi anonymously I’ll use cash.
Right but the comment I responded to was comparing transaction fees. I pay zero transaction fees for using cash. I am willing to pay some small percentage to help protect me from fraud (and I have used that protection). Why would I pay a fee AND assume all the risk?
This is why IMO blockchains should be designed to be inflationary. On one hand it just makes sense that as more compute is added transactions should be able to process faster and tokens should be minted more rapidly, such that by "mining" you are producing real value (allowing the chain to process more transactions per second and more people to acquire tokens), on the other very few people use crypto for anything besides speculation so such a coin would never be widely adopted.
I think this is why the fiat system is inflationary (low level inflation is seen as healthy). Assuming that productive projects exist, you never want lack of capital to be the reason that they're not done. The free market is never going to perfectly allocate capital, therefore there should be some extra money in the system to allow for errors. The errors would cause inflation (money supply increased, but productive output did not), but this is better than being overly cautious.
Incidentally this is why austerity in debt-laden countries is kind of a terrible idea. You're taking a broken economy and removing what little slack remains in the system. And if the economy was broken due to corruption or incompetent government, you're kind of just betting on regime change at this point, which (apart from the human toll) won't be great economically either.
If the transient use of a cryptocurrency is increasing, the demand for it will be, and the price will follow. If the price is increasing fast enough, it could be worth holding. The same is true of any money or asset used for payments/settling debts (like gold or silver).
Only if people hold it for the transaction for a significant length of time. If people want to get out ASAP, then the faster that transactions happen, the less demand for bitcoin there will be.
this doesn't work super well because if a currency appreciates in value due to usage and you start to hold it, that means there's less of an incentive to spend it in the first place. That's one of the reasons why we're not trading in gold coins any more, it's almost exclusively turned into an appreciating store of value.
Deflationary currency is undesirable as a means of exchange because you don't want to use it, and that is also one of the reasons why central banks target low inflation rates.
That’s not totally true. The value of a Bitcoin does relate to how much effort miners put in. So, $1 might be low enough to allow some sort of attack on the network.
> The value of a Bitcoin does relate to how much effort miners put in.
It looks like you have the causal relationship there backwards. A bitcoin currently has value, so there's a lot of effort miners put in to get the block rewards + fees. But the amount of effort a miner puts in doesn't make the price go up, the price can move independently to hashrate.
> I never understood the argument why crypto was a good store of value.
Its digital gold thats it, its no more a store of value than antique's, rare cars, fine arts etc etc and unsurprisingly those markets can also see the bottom drop out of them for decades. Ultimately its people en masse who decide what something is worth, but big players can manipulate those markets with resources, laws, taxation, media sentiment and its easy to spook people when they value something, so dont get attached to anything if you dont want to be manipulated.
The other thing to note is, it only takes a few hundred million £ on the Asian market to get the GBP to drop against the USD in time for European markets. So there are very few entities who can cause the crypto market to fall like this. Think about that.
Gold can be used for corrosion-resistant electrical contacts, infrared reflectors for space telescopes, decoration in gaudy penthouses, and more even if everyone decided it was useless as a currency.
An antique desk that loses all value in the open market can still be used as a desk or at least firewood.
A rare car can still be used to transport yourself, as a prop in a movie, or scrap for other projects.
A "worthless" painting can still inspire, liven up a room, or gifted as a gag.
Crypto that loses its value has no other underlying utility over and above the output of /dev/random. That's a MASSIVE difference and more clearly demarcates BTC as a money laundering/Ponzi scheme rather than "digital gold" or a viable currency.
> Crypto that loses its value has no other underlying utility over and above the output of /dev/random. That's a MASSIVE difference and more clearly demarcates BTC as a money laundering/Ponzi scheme rather than "digital gold" or a viable currency.
Its a decentralised currency, its not backed up by a country and their nuclear arsenal rammed down people's throats as we will possibly be seeing with Ukraine.
Notes/currency only has value where the threat of violence extends to prevent any counterfeiting attempts, so just like you see matches or cigarettes used as currency in a prison, it still has value. Its value went up when the Greeks had their financial crisis because the Greek banks stopped money leaving the country and this is the important thing, crypto is the thing that helps people move money out of a country fast across borders in a crisis. If you tried to move gold in or out of Switzerland you'll get stopped at the border, they are hot on that sort of stuff but it also shows their level of intelligence in world affairs. Crypto if done properly has a level of privacy affordable to anyone, not just the super rich but also a level of transparency to maintain its integrity from counterfeiting by criminals or the central bank.
I think you've nailed it. It's not backed by a nation. It has no underlying asset like gold. Your assertions of privacy only hold if you never convert it to a traditional currency or asset, otherwise you're on the radar. While many folks in Ukraine have been able to use crypto to buy goods recently, so has Russia to sidestep sanctions. As a result, we're seeing more incentive for nations to put the breaks on BTC and other crypto (with threat from their nuclear arsenal). China already has put substantial obstacles to crypto ownership.
Then there's the lack of an FDIC equivalent for crypto, which is HUGE for the "not just the super rich" demographics. The 19th and 20th centuries had many examples of runs on the bank where life savings were wiped out. Crypto exchanges have already screwed thousands, and maintaining your own wallet and transfers is not ever going mainstream even if crypto had any intrinsic worth beyond speculation—which it doesn't.
If you have the assets to gamble, that's for you to decide. I myself would rather rely on assets with underlying value that extends beyond speculation.
My house is worth way more than I think it should be. Helps my credit score. But if it and all the homes in the area suddenly and magically dropped to $0, I'd still live there, because it's a home. The reason I purchased it wasn't for speculation or my credit score; it was to live in. You can't live or eat or build in BTC. When the bottom drops out, you will only get to keep the bits and the memories of a more naive era.
Eyebrows raised. What this is showing is that both tech stocks and crypto were being propped up by the same investors/behavior (speculation) and are highly correlated. I thought this was a good test regarding crypto being a “store or value” since inflation devalues fiat currency, one hypothesis was crypto would rise with market turmoil and high inflation as “digital gold”. I guess that hypothesis was incorrect.
IMO, this hypothesis hasn't been adequately tested. By all accounts inflation is bad, but not THAT bad. However, I'm sure Bitcoin and most Cryptocurrency is looking pretty stable with respect to Venezuela's 2,00,00% inflation. Bitcoin as a hedge against economic turmoil requires real economic turmoil.
A Venezuelan could also own dollar/euro denominated assets or commodities. BTC would need to be better and more stable than those for someone to view it as an effective hedge.
If US or EU inflation hit 2000% there would be global consequences. There is no reserve asset currently large enough to redenominate US denominated assets, aid payments would collapse, and currencies pegged to the dollar would collapse. Betting on BTC for such a world is reasonable, as there would be a reasonable chance your gold reserves would be become inaccessible, seized, or both. However ammunition might be a more effective financial hedge in this situation.
You mean flash back a few years to the pre-pandemic era? I think its safe to say the ripples of that particular boulder hitting global financial markets will be felt for decades to come.
It's a shame, a couple years ago BTC was anticorrelated with markets. Then institutional investors started playing and since then crypto largely just tracks the markets. I wonder, where do these investors park their cash when they sell holdings during downturns?
S&P has only retraced to March 2021. Nasdaq to Oct 2020. A bunch of COVID plays like Zoom, Peloton, etc only back to summer 2019 levels. That's only 3 years back.
If you look at the dot-com boom, S&P bottomed out in 2002 back to 1997 levels. That's a 5 year retracement. Currently S&P has barely gone back 14 months.
The GFC was worse - bottomed in Dec 2008 hitting 1996 levels - a 12 year retracement. I'd say going back beyond an entire economic cycle is probably actually oversold.
Depends on the timeframe and your gut. I should have specified that I'm thinking about the next 3-6 months or so, not the next 3-6 years.
And there isn't any definition. And particularly in response to exogenous events the markets may decide to keep dropping even though they've dropped a lot. If markets always moved in a straight line it would be easy to make a ton of money off of them so they don't. However, if markets never moved in a straight line though it would be easy to make a ton of money off of them so every now and then they do.
And mostly I'm weighing what I'm seeing, which is that the yield curve isn't inverted yet, the broader economy is healthy and job growth is good and there's way more jobs than there are job seekers, along with no signs that something of substantial size has detonated in the economy yet (CMBS or whatever). Letting the air out of the overpriced tech stocks and venture capital also just doesn't seem large enough to start to tank the economy, larger corrections have happened during mid cycle slowdowns before. And UST-Luna is barely a pimple on the broader economy.
Right now I don't believe this is the start of the next recession, so the fact that COVID plays are back to summer-2019 levels suggests to me that a lot of work has actually gotten done in repricing.
Show me an inverted yield curve and CMBS popping or maybe Russian gas to Germany gets abruptly turned off and then I'll start expecting those longer scale kinds of retracements.
Stock prices are back around where they were before the pandemic. It may have already been overvalued at that time, but perhaps it is a level of overvalue that people are comfortable with as we were already there before the system got flooded with money.
That is normalized to 1 in late 2007. At the end of 2021, it was 2.53; at the end of the first quarter of this year it's at 2.37. In 1Q 2020, it was 1.80. Stock prices have been increasingly disconnected from the economy 2014-2015.
Cool, and that was 2 years ago, during which many index components grew 20-30% year over year. Folks lose perspective on just how good these companies are at growing their revenues.
GOOG for instance, was making a trailing $160B per year going into COVID. Now it's making a trailing $270B per year. [1]
The S&P 500 P/E ratio is down to 20 from 25 on January 1, 2020, so the S&P 500 at least is 17% cheaper now than before COVID. [2]
And looking at mid-cap tech? Shopify is trading at a lower ticker price than at the bottom of the COVID drop on March 19, 2020 - despite having tripled their revenue since then.
"everything is a bit oversold right now on negative emotions"
No!!!
The Fed is raising rates. That is reality. That is not an emotion. That is absolute economic fact. Inflation is high and will remain high for at least a year (maybe longer). The period from 2008 to 2022 is going to be remembered as an abnormal period when we experienced abnormally low rates. The low rates fueled speculation, and bid up certain stocks and assets.
The era of low rates is over. It is possible that you might live another 100 years and never again see a 14 year stretch where rates average as low as they did from 2008 to 2022.
Emotions? No. These are not emotions. Rising rates are a material fact that people need to adjust to.
I think there are going to be two periods remembered in 2008-2022. The 2008-2012-15 where interest rates were made low to prevent a depression and it worked. The the 2012-15-2022 period where interest rates were kept abnormally low because politicians didn't want to be blamed for hurting the stock market causing a bubble that pops when interest rates are forced to rise.
Nope, the fed will crank up short term rates and crater the economy to tamp down wage inflation. That will invert the yield curve and long rates (>10 years) will still remain historically low and disinflationary.
And they've been playing this game since the 90s and the Greenspan fed did it first a blew up the housing bubble that popped in 2008. This cycle goes beyond the memories of Millennials. It just keeps getting worse every cycle.
This is the bit that makes me so angry. Wages lag behind commodity prices and the correction always happens because businesses complain about labor costs (“muh jobs” despite us being at near full employment) and don’t let them catch up to CoL.
It’s infuriating how much the game is rigged against laborers.
> Inflation is high and will remain high for at least a year (maybe longer).
Is it? Month over month inflation numbers are only slightly elevated, in the annualized 3% range. This isn't particularly high - the high inflation already happened, it's over.
CPI and PPI numbers both came in good. PPI of particular note, services were up 0% month over month, and commodities 1.3% for a blended 0.56% (in line with expectations). Commodities of course are likely to correct hard and fast once the geopolitical situation resolves.
The market is forward looking, so don't get stuck on a dead narrative!
> The era of low rates is over.
I'm not sure we know this either. If the hikes play out, we'll land around what, 2-3% for the fed funds rate? That's low, historically. And that's a big if, IMO, since inflation is showing signs of being quite well controlled again, and the Fed's goal isn't to achieve a specific funds rate - just low inflation and high employment. High funds rate hurts the employment goal.
It's fun to speculate but important to remember, you're just speculating. So am I. There's no certainty here, and it's pretty easy to construct a compelling counter-narrative.
All we know for sure right now is the Fed funds rate is 1%.
I mean this sincerely if I could just park my savings in an “exactly matches inflation” account I would be over the moon. So yeah kinda, I believe it. Terrible interest rates have genuinely caused me to have to find somewhere to put my money that isn’t a bank.
Yes. But think institutional investors of various flavors rather than personal, individual accounts.
The 2-3% is the Fed funds rate; actual rates on government and commercial bonds will be somewhat higher. (A friend recently pointed out the current 6% advertised rate on lower-grade commercial bonds.) Couple that with much lower risks (on things that aren't those 6% bonds) and it becomes a good third option for anyone whose previous choice was between -3% inflationary return on cash and stock market risks.
The emotion is the entirely predictable market overreaction to rate changes we all knew would eventually be coming. Market swings are drastically out of proportion to the actual impact these rate changes will have on the underlying businesses. In both directions. It's ALL emotion.
> The era of low rates is over. It is possible that you might live another 100 years and never again see a 14 year stretch where rates average as low as they did from 2008 to 2022.
The interest rate is currently at 1%. In the 80s it hit 20%. I expect it'll go negative in the next 20 years.
You're not wrong. I just think inflation will get within comfortable numbers again, but we'll still face recession events that cause a drive to lower the interest rates.
> The era of low rates is over. It is possible that you might live another 100 years and never again see a 14 year stretch where rates average as low as they did from 2008 to 2022.
Goodness, I hope not. The amount of progress we've seen in these years has been astounding. Deep learning, SpaceX, smart phones. I felt like things had gotten stagnant, then we truly started hitting our stride.
It’s not relay about how much “progress” we’ve made. It’s about employment, once we hit full employment there’s no more water you can squeeze from the rock.
Which is why I’m kinda shocked that the US isn’t more gung ho about immigration because as long as there’s more useful work to do, and there is, we can fuel growth with capital plus people.
Okay, go out and buy puts on the S&P500 that are 6 months out and see how you do. I suspect the market will bounce and blow you out.
Rates are rising, but the yield curve isn't inverted yet, and the stock market is unlikely to continue this losing streak straight down. It normally doesn't happen that way. Emotions right now are very negative and a lot of people are going to make bets thats are exceedingly negative and in the 3-6 month short term period other people will make money off of them.
This does not feel to me like the start of the crash, possibly not even the top, although we might go sideways until the crash.
And there will be low interest rates again.
The point of the Fed raising interest rates on the low end is to tank the economy hard enough to eliminate wage inflation. Given the overhang of jobs over jobseekers (and likely the effects of COVID death and disability on the workforce and boomers retiring) this one is likely to be exceedingly painful.
When the Fed engineers the economy tanking that means that rates will get slashed again and >10 year bonds will not budge upwards.
What it will look like when long rates go up is that wage inflation will actually take hold consistently.
And low rates already blew up the dot com bubble in 2001 and the housing bubble in 2008. Read up on the Greenspan Fed.
They're going to jack rates up, tank the economy and then go back to ZIRP again.
Short rates != Long rates. Fed doesn't control long rates.
Why would short sellers be needing to sell positions during a crash? The market has been dropping so a significant number of these short sellers won't have to sell.
Because people emotionally decide that everything is crashing RIGHT NOW and go short to try to make money off of it because IT CAN ONLY GO DOWN.
Does it seem completely inconceivable that the SPX might not reverse and touch $4766 again? Well why don't you take up a leveraged short position which will be highly profitable if the SPX doubles its current fall which you won't be forced to cover unless the SPX bounces back up again. It's free money.
Except double tops in the market happen, precisely because people decide it's all over and at this point in the market take out short bets, and then get burned when it bounces back up and destroys them. As the market in a doomed economy actually goes upwards they all get burned and squeezed which fuels the short squeeze bounce, even though it violates conventional wisdom.
Once you've destroyed all those people who think they've found the gold mine of a safe leveraged bet then the second downwards move can exceed these lows because those people are licking their wounds (but triple-tops happen as well).
To a certain extent the stock market is an optimization engine that ruins literally everyone who thinks they understand the short term direction of the market. If it didn't, you'd be able to make safe money off of it.
The fact that everyone in this thread thinks its all falling, falling, falling means it is probably going to bounce up about now for a bit (of course if that was a 100% safe thing though you could make safe money off of it so nothing is ever entirely certain -- and Russia might launch a nuke at NATO tomorrow).
Everythinig was way overbought when considering the money for those past purchases came from an accommodative Fed that flooded the economy with $9 trillion that currently sits on its balance sheet, lowered interest rates to literally 0 and the government sending out stimulus like it was candy.
All of which are either done or ending.
So I think a better way to phrase it is that the market is repricing with the new information, it isn't oversold.
Luna's supply hyperinflated (from 100 million Luna to 6 trillion Luna) to try to save UST's backing, as designed. That's why its price got rammed irreversibly into the ground.
Cryptocurrencies in general, and shares of stocks, do not hyperinflate.
Oh, it absolutely did, it crashed down to 4 zeros, then bounced back up to 3, roughly a +300%-1000% price movement over the course of a day. Of course, liquidity may have been incredibly low, but there were reports of people turning $40 into $400 in the aftermath of all this.
Obviously, it crashed so much, the "bottom" was anyone's guess (well.. zero is the only one that makes sense now). But there are bounces all the way down. If you drop a bouncy ball down an infinite staircase it doesn't take a straight line down.
I think it would take something like Russia launching nukes at NATO to cause the stock market to tank in a straight line though.
Maybe less extremely, Russian nat gas going to Germany being shut off overnight might do it as well.
Stocks/securities/crypto usually never go straight down unless it has become apparent that they're fundamentally worthless. I don't see that becoming common sentiment with the US economy.
More likely we're going to see a short squeeze start around now though. WSB on reddit is likely piling into the SPY heavily short, expecting the market to drop line a stone like it did at the start of the pandemic and they're dreaming of chicken tendies. They'll likely get blown out in a squeeze.
Likely, likely, probably though.
I can also predict the winner of the premiere league today based on the odds, but they still gotta play the games.
As I’ve been learning about value investing and growth stocks, it feels like we’re in a weird middle. Stocks aren’t cheap enough to attract the people who want to buy at a discount, and they’re not sexy enough to rally on the hype train. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the short term, and I wouldn’t really want to pretend that I do.
> I mean everything is a bit oversold right now on negative emotions, both in the crypto space and in the stock markets.
I like your optimism but we are still well above what most people would consider reasonable valuations. That said there are trillions of new dollars out there that won't want to sit on the sidelines decaying at an 8% clip forever. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
I mean everything is a bit oversold right now on negative emotions, both in the crypto space and in the stock markets.
There's probably going to be a positive bounce just because markets don't move in straight lines.
There is always the chance that something else explodes due to stress tomorrow and hits the headlines and crypto and/or stocks start melting down again (nothing is ever a sure bet), but it feels like we're closer to hitting a point of selling exhaustion and an inflection point of negative sentiment.