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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Roads End who wrote (169337)3/10/2021 12:00:37 AM
From: sense  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217656
 
" But since we all understand that all commodity markets are a zero sum game with one buyer and one seller, you actually never have a situation where there are more buyers than sellers"

And I stopped reading there...

Apparently, since Feb 22... the CFTC started enforcing the laws preventing fraud in commodities trading ? Strange i didn't hear anything about that...



To: Roads End who wrote (169337)3/10/2021 2:44:50 AM
From: TobagoJack1 Recommendation

Recommended By
Haim R. Branisteanu

  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 217656
 
I guess one problem might be that the gold clearing and silver washout is happening at the same proximate time as a due nasdaq debacle, and also a bond massacre. Under the circumstances of many pieces moving large and prospectively large steps on a leverage boat full of hope and incipient fear, hard to be convinced that the water is warm and all can hop in

as far as correction goes, yes, gold corrected somewhat as did bonds. Stocks not at all, comparative. Makes sense as all seems to be triggered by interest rate event, and not really any valuation concerns.

As if we have a relative correction, and not an absolute clearance sale.

bloomberg.com

The Tech Stocks Rebound Is a Dinosaur Brain Event

The tail has been bitten, but the signal hasn't reached the control center yet.
John Authers
10 March 2021, 13:09 GMT+8



Call my broker and tell him I'll have 100 board lots of Tesla.

Photographer: JULIO CESAR AGUILAR/AFP/Getty Images

John Authers is a senior editor for markets. Before Bloomberg, he spent 29 years with the Financial Times, where he was head of the Lex Column and chief markets commentator. He is the author of “The Fearful Rise of Markets” and other books.
Read more opinion Follow @johnauthers on Twitter

Whiplash for the Brontosaurus
When markets are their most bizarre, as they have been in the last 24 hours, I find myself embracing the brontosaurus. That long-tailed dinosaur was the hero of an analogy drawn by Jeremy Grantham, the highly respected co-founder of fund management firm GMO in Boston, back in the summer of 2007. I have found it useful ever since. The brontosaurus symbolizes the stock market, and the key point is that giant dinosaurs were exceptionally slow on the uptake.

This is what Grantham wrote:

In the fixed income markets the disease – best characterized as the questioning of previously blind faith – slowly spreads: a little widening of the junk bond spread here and a little tightening of private equity credit there. But as yet the equity market seems totally unaffected with volatile and risky stocks still making the running. Although the brontosaurus has been bitten on the tail, the message has not yet reached its tiny brain, but is proceeding up the long backbone, one vertebra at a time.

To be clear, Grantham was talking at a point when much of Wall Street had accepted that we were already in a financial crisis. Here is how my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Justin Fox , then of Time, wrote up Grantham’s comments in July 2007:

Again and again in these past few months, financial markets have appeared to be on the verge of something very scary. It happened first and most jarringly in February, when subprime-mortgage woes made headlines in the U.S. and a market crashlet in Shanghai sent global stocks into a swoon. Lately the scares have been smaller but more frequent: a sharp rise in interest rates in May, runs on a couple of hedge funds in June, a sudden drop in demand for risky mortgage and corporate debt in July….

Then markets calmed, the Dow cracked 14,000, and the world got back to business. Don't count on that happening forever--today's jitters do probably presage something worse. "Rather like a brontosaurus that has been bitten on the tail and most of the body hasn't noticed it yet, the signal is working its way up the vertebrae," says Jeremy Grantham.

The similarities with the market moves of the last few days are obvious. A few weeks ago, the brontosaurus’s brain at last got wind of the rise in bond yields, and began to grasp that valuations may no longer be sustainable. Cue a huge rotation toward stocks that would benefit from higher yields and reflation.

Then on Tuesday came the moment when the brontosaurus twisted its giant neck to see what was happening, and gave itself and everyone riding on its back a terrible case of whiplash.

Tuesday was an epic reversal, interrupting a historic rotation. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the Nasdaq Composite index gained more than 4%, and Tesla Inc. somehow rose 19.6%. In one day. That raised its market cap by $107 billion — which is exactly equal to the entire market value of BlackRock Inc., the world’s biggest money manager.

But the bottom line remains that the rotation is intact. Tuesday’s dramatic rebound was the kind of dumb and reactive move that you might expect from a brontosaurus; it doesn’t tell us which direction the market is going in.

One way to show that the rotation is unbroken for now is to look at the relative performance of value and momentum stocks, as measured by Bloomberg. Value did far worse than momentum on Tuesday — but the trend remains clear:



Meanwhile, the key measures of the bond market did not move much at all. The 10-year yield was crimped back, as was the five-year inflation breakeven, but both were minor moves that didn’t shift the underlying trend. Note, incidentally, that although the explosive rise in yields over the last few months has been the catalyst for the current frenzied equity activity, the biggest trading days for the stock market have been relatively quiet for bonds. Stocks have been late to grasp what is going on.



It’s also important to recognize that what is afoot is a rotation, and not a selloff. Despite the remarkable trading action, the effect on the broader benchmark indexes continues to be unremarkable. The equal-weighted version of the S&P 500, in which each stock accounts for 0.2% of the index irrespective of its size, finished Tuesday within a whisker of its all-time high. The “average stock,” if there is such a thing, is doing fine. And the decline in broad all-world indexes, including all developed and emerging markets, is nothing to write home about. The last two days of frenetic drama in U.S. markets barely show up:



Does Tuesday’s upheaval have any predictive value? Not really. Big rebounds generally only come when a market has fallen a long way and become oversold. Critically, they don’t generally signal that the bottom has been reached. As evidence, note that the single best day for the S&P 500 since the war was Oct. 13, 2008, when it rebounded by more than 11% after a fall of more than 20% the previous week. There was no particular news that day, and the bottom wouldn’t come until March of the following year. The other biggest gains for the S&P on the chart below all fit this pattern — they were dramatic interruptions to downward slides, as stocks became temporarily oversold. None signaled an end to the selloff. So there is no particular reason to assume that the decline for the Nasdaq and tech stocks is over:



A look at the past history of big divergences between the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the Dow Industrials is also instructive. Bespoke Investment Group charted all the days when the Nasdaq dropped more than 2% while the Dow was up for the day. There aren’t many of them, and all the previous ones came as the Nasdaq bubble was in the process of bursting 21 years ago. Such big and disparate moves, at the risk of stating the obvious, are a sign that something isn’t right:



It’s also important not to be too excited by huge percentages following a big decline. The following chart, also from Bespoke Investment Group, charts daily changes for the ARK Innovation exchange-traded fund, flagship for the currently very famous tech investor Cathie Wood, and shows that Tuesday was its best single day ever, returning more than 10%. The lower chart shows that this has still had little impact on the direction of the share price.



What can we predict for the future? Much depends on bond yields. So far, their moves have been slow enough to avoid bringing the brontosaurus to its knees. A sharp rise in bond yields from here — and this is something that has been feared since the global financial crisis, without ever coming to pass — could do a lot of damage. But the key will be in the bond market.

For now, I’d like to return to Grantham, writing in July 2007. He was frighteningly prescient, predicting that the stock market would last out the year (it peaked in October), and that the risks of all-out failure wouldn’t become high until October of the following year, which was exactly when the selloff turned into a rout. The following passage, also from the brontosaurus memo, is uncomfortably similar to what has been happening in the last few weeks:

In just 3 or 4 weeks in June the 10-year bond rate jumped by 60 basis points. This was not, we are assured on all sides, caused by inflation – although a June survey of investment managers did indeed show a sharp jump where 45% of them were concerned about inflation. No, it was caused by an increase in “growth,” whatever that means. What was impressive and surprising, though, was the similar rate increase for 10-year TIPS, which moved rapidly from 2.1% to 2.8%. So we can understand some odd theories coming out. But rising TIPS means that the broad cost of capital or the risk-free rate has risen, and by a lot! This of course should cause an immediate and severe sell-off in all asset class prices as well, for in theory they are affected by changes in the real discount rate more reliably than anything else. But, in practice they did not fall, for as always the real world is merely an inconvenient special case. Indeed, emerging market equities surged in precisely the same 4-week period, gaining almost 10% against other equities. To rub it in, volatile stocks in most markets, but particularly in the U.S., beat the pants off safe stocks, thumbing their noses at any suggestion that they were impressed by the increased appreciation of risk by their fixed income colleagues. We wonder if this will come to seem like the behavior of headless chickens: the equity guys are often the last to know they’re dead. But it has always seemed likely that this would be a global equity market that would die hard.

Survival Tips
After all this excitement in the stock market, I'd like to suggest some appropriate reading. This month's Bloomberg book club selection is Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre, the investment classic that tells the story of the adventures of the speculator Jesse Livermore in the first two decades of the last century. There is nothing new under the sun; his exploits, written with clear explanations of what he was doing and much psychological insight, read like the unusually honest memoir of a contemporary hedge fund manager. It's genuinely fun to read, like a novel.

There is one big change of plan. We were going to be holding the live blog to discuss the book next Wednesday, to help fill the quiet hours before the Federal Open Market Committee meeting in the afternoon. Unfortunately, there is now a direct clash with a congressional hearing on the goings-on around GameStop Corp. (currently rebounding and up more than 1,200% for the year) which is very much the kind of adventure in which Jesse Livermore involved himself, so we will postpone for a week. We will hold this conversation instead on March 24, starting at 11 p.m. New York time (4 a.m. London time). Discussing it with me on the terminal will be Larry Tabb, long a guru of market structure and these days a Bloomberg colleague, Jamie Catherwood of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management and best known as the “financial history” guy who runs the Investor Amnesiablog, which I enthusiastically recommend; and my brilliant colleague from the Bloomberg markets reporting team, Kriti Gupta.

As for arrangements, if you want to follow the discussion live, you need access to the terminal. You can still ask questions in advance by emailing them to the book club email: authersnotes@bloomberg.net. The full transcript will be published on the web in the New York afternoon. Yes, if you want to follow the conversation live and in real time you need a terminal; but everyone has the ability to participate by asking questions, and everyone has access to the full conversation. Please get reading (the book can be picked up very cheaply online), and send in any comments and questions. I will try to highlight responses in Points of Return over the next two weeks.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
John Authers at jauthers@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Matthew Brooker at mbrooker1@bloomberg.net

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.
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To: Roads End who wrote (169337)3/11/2021 6:52:54 PM
From: TobagoJack1 Recommendation

Recommended By
MulhollandDrive

  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217656
 
unclear to me that anyone shall ever have to describe to us gold, the eternal and primordial, to us naturally-biased in the following terms, but sort of funny if one does a mental search-replace, substituting "gold" wherever one sees "bitcoin"

unsure I like the description, for it is too clinical, takes the mystery out and erases the wonder

sort of like porn, I would imagine, recorded on X-ray film

nevertheless, cannot wait for episode 2

ark-invest.com

On-Chain Data: A New Framework to Evaluate Bitcoin

This article was co-authored by David Puell ( @kenoshaking). David is a full-time cryptocurrency on-chain analyst and market researcher. Best known for pioneering the emergent field of on-chain analysis, David has created original Bitcoin valuation metrics, including the MVRV Ratio, the Puell Multiple, and average coin dormancy.

Bitcoin’s inability to fit neatly within the framework associated with traditional asset classes has dissuaded institutional investors from adopting it. We believe that instead of considering its unique attributes, skeptical investors have concluded that Bitcoin, the blockchain, and bitcoin, the cryptocurrency, cannot be analyzed fundamentally.

In our view, investors increasingly will appreciate Bitcoin’s investment merits through the lens of a completely new framework. While conventional analytical frameworks are not suitable, Bitcoin offers a unique set of tools that investors can leverage to assess its fundamentals.

In the same way that a government statistical agency publishes data about a country’s population and economy, or a public company publishes quarterly financial statements disclosing growth rates and earnings, Bitcoin provides a real-time, global ledger that publishes data about the network’s activity and inner economics. In the absence of central control, Bitcoin’s blockchain provides open-source data, its integrity a function of the network’s transparency.

Investors Can Analyze Open-Source Data and Assess Bitcoin’s Fundamentals

As we will explore in this three-part blog series, market participants can source on-chain data to analyze Bitcoin in more depth than is possible with any other traditional asset. We categorize the depth of analysis with a three-layered pyramid, with lower layers serving as the building blocks for higher layers, as shown below.



Note: The Market Value to Realized Value (MVRV) ratio is a long-term metric used to assess bitcoin’s market cycles over the long term. HODL is a term derived from a misspelling of “hold” that refers to buy-and-hold strategies in the context of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, 2020

Before delving into the details, the data in the bottom layer of the pyramid assesses the general health of the network: network security, monetary integrity, transparency, and usage. Accessed by any blockchain “search-engine”, the data in this layer is raw and straight-forward, requiring little to no manipulation. Relevant to all market observers, it offers a basic “fact sheet” about the network. In this blog, we will explore this data layer in detail after summarizing the other two layers.

The data in the middle layer delves deeper: by wallet address, it discloses each holder’s positions and cost bases any time of the day. In the long-term bitcoin’s price might react more to the raw network health data in layer 1, but in the short- to medium-term the behavior of buyers and sellers can help investors surface inefficiencies in the pricing and valuation of this non-productive asset.

Finally, in the top layer is data leveraging off the two lower layers, providing relative valuation metrics that identify short- to mid-term inefficiencies in bitcoin’s price. Particularly useful for active managers, the top data layer provides buy and sell signals in the crypto market much like relative valuation multiples such as EV-to-EBITDA in the public equities market.

In this three-part blog series, in collaboration with Glassnode, we illustrate how on-chain data offers a new framework to analyze emerging monetary assets like bitcoin. As institutional investors gain exposure to bitcoin, we believe that the network’s three data layers will enhance their understanding of and confidence in its underlying fundamentals. Throughout this series, we aim to unpack the power of on-chain data and describe the tools and techniques that should enable investors to turn raw open-source data into actionable investment decisions.

While we could extend this framework and analysis to other cryptocurrencies that run on open-source software, the focus of this series is on bitcoin and the Bitcoin network. Important to note, no other network rivals Bitcoin’s in transparency which, in our view, makes it the most “analyzable” and fundamentally-sound network.

Why Bitcoin?

Not all blockchains are created equal. The more open and transparent a blockchain is, the easier market participants can analyze its underlying fundamentals. The most useful public blockchains offer easy-to-access tools to audit their networks. Today, any individual can download a Bitcoin client, install a node, and extract insightful network data with relatively low barriers to entry. We believe Bitcoin’s auditability, openness, and transparency stem from three of the network’s characteristics:

Bitcoin Has A Simple Accounting System: In contrast to traditional account-based accounting systems, Bitcoin’s UTXO-based accounting system makes tracking supply and auditing monetary policy simple.Bitcoin’s Code is Verified: The implementation of Bitcoin’s protocol lives in code that has been scrutinized more than any other open-source software code.Bitcoin Nodes Are Efficient: Bitcoin nodes, or volunteer computers running software to verify the network’s integrity, are much more cost-efficient than alternative cryptocurrency network nodes.Layer 1: Assessing the Health of The Bitcoin Network

Investors can monitor the health of the Bitcoin network in real time by extracting raw open-source data from Bitcoin nodes. In the table below, we describe and provide metrics for three ways to assess the health of the network.

Table 1: Assessing the Health of The Bitcoin Network

Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, 2020

I. Monetary Integrity
The Bitcoin protocol has ensured monetary integrity by giving analysts and investors the ability to track bitcoin’s total circulating supply and daily issuance, both shown in the charts below. Total circulating supply is a function of historical monetary policy and daily issuance current monetary policy. From its inception, monetary policy has been pre-determined and encoded in the Bitcoin protocol, making it completely predictable and verifiable. Buttressed by a robust system of checks and balances, Bitcoin’s strict adherence to a rules-based monetary policy highlights its integrity.



For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any particular security or cryptocurrency.

Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, Glassnode



For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any particular security or cryptocurrency.

Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, Glassnode

II. Security
Bitcoin’s security is guaranteed by miners, who ensure transactions are verified and irreversible. Hash rate, as shown below, measures the processing power miners use to secure the network from attacks. All else equal, rising hash rate levels increase the security of the network.



For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any particular security or cryptocurrency.

Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, Glassnode

Hash rate has increased nearly an order of magnitude every two years for the last six years, as shown above, three times faster than the rise in bitcoin’s price during the last five years. Supporting the dramatic rise in hash rate are advances in hardware and miners’ willingness to invest based on the expectation of bitcoin’s price appreciation over time. Interestingly, only in the past few months has the price of bitcoin surpassed its 2017 high during which time its hash rate has increased by 950%.

Miner revenue, the sum of newly minted bitcoin and transaction fees, also is a measure of miner investment in securing the network. Since inception, miners have generated revenue of over 18.5 million bitcoin, roughly $600 billion at current prices, as shown below.



For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any particular security or cryptocurrency.

Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, Glassnode

III. Usage
Investors can monitor Bitcoin’s network activity and usage by tracking the number of active addresses, a proxy for user adoption, in addition to transaction volume, a proxy for economic activity.

Active Addresses

Thanks to the transparency of the Bitcoin network, market participants can monitor its activity down to the level of active addresses. While not a direct proxy for the number of users, active addresses show the number of unique addresses active on the network on any given day. Single addresses can represent either individuals or exchanges and mining operations. The number of daily active Bitcoin addresses exceeds 1 million,[1] its increase correlating positively with bitcoin’s price over time.



For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any particular security or cryptocurrency.

Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, Glassnode

A more granular breakdown of active addresses can capture the distribution of bitcoin in each address over time. As shown below, the share of bitcoin in addresses holding more than 10,000 bitcoin has decreased over time, while the share holding fewer than 10 has increased. In other words, it appears the wealth associated with bitcoin is decentralizing, broadening out.



For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any particular security or cryptocurrency.

Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, Glassnode

Transaction Volume

Since its creation, Bitcoin has settled approximately $10 trillion in transactions, highlighting its ability to serve as a global settlement system. When divided by circulating supply, transaction volume can provide some insight into bitcoin’s annualized velocity, as shown below. During the past eight years, the velocity of bitcoin has dropped to a level not seen since 2011, perhaps for several reasons: investors could be hoarding it or could have lost it, and/or transaction activity could be moving off-chain.



For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any particular security or cryptocurrency.

Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, Glassnode

Transaction count is a good proxy of economic activity but is not correlated highly with price in shorter term periods. Bitcoin has facilitated more than 600 million transactions in its 12-year history, with robust activity continuing in recent years despite wide swings in the price. During the 2018 bear market, for example, transaction count actually increased roughly 35% as bitcoin’s price dropped by 73%, as shown below, suggesting healthy network activity.



For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any particular security or cryptocurrency.

Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, Glassnode

Now that we have described the health of the Bitcoin network, in Part 2 of this series we will analyze the second data layer of the pyramid, including flows into and out of bitcoin, the behavior of holders, and the cost bases of various cohorts.

This article is in collaboration with Glassnode ( @glassnode). Glassnode is a blockchain data and intelligence provider that generates innovative on-chain metrics and tools for digital asset stakeholders.

To learn more, we invite you to download ARK’s two-part Bitcoin white paper: Bitcoin: A Novel Economic Institution and Bitcoin As An Investment.