Macro

The Bet on a Stronger Dollar Was the Most Crowded in Three Years of Data.

Then the US Bought Yen.

Every Tuesday the CFTC takes a snapshot of who holds what in the major currency futures markets. The snapshot taken on July 28 showed speculators net short a combined 300,673 contracts of euro, yen and sterling futures, which is 19.8 percent of the open…

The Fed Has Cut 0.75 Points Since Last Summer.

The Two-Year Treasury Has Risen 0.48.

Brent crude settled at 100.69 dollars on Thursday, up about 7 percent, after Houthi forces attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. US stocks fell hard. The Nasdaq Composite lost 2.15 percent and the S&P 500 lost 1.21 percent, while interest rate…

Gold's 30-Day Correlation With Bitcoin Reached 0.64.

With Long Treasuries It Is 0.10.

Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis said on Wednesday that they had attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. Saudi authorities confirmed damage to one of them, the Encelia. The UK Maritime Trade Operations office reported a vessel struck about 70 nautical…

Bitcoin and Ethereum Rose This Week While Every Major US Stock Index Fell.

The Macro Regime Behind Them Did Not Shift.

Over the past week Bitcoin and Ethereum are up while the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100, the Dow and the Russell 2000 are all down. On Tuesday the gap widened, with Bitcoin up about 3 percent on the day and US stocks set to open lower. A week where crypto rises and…

Oil Rose About 15 Percent This Week as US-Iran Strikes Turned Deadly.

Speculators Went Into the Surge Near Their Lightest Crude Bet of the Year.

Crude oil just had its sharpest week since April. WTI settled near 82 dollars a barrel on Friday, up about 15 percent over the five sessions, and Brent closed near 88 dollars, up about 16 percent. The catalyst was not subtle. Iranian missiles and drones…

Wheat Rose 11 Percent in Six Sessions on Black Sea Strikes.

A Second Supply Signal Was Firing at the Same Time, an Ocean Away.

Chicago wheat futures closed at 611.25 cents per bushel on July 9. By Friday morning, July 17, the contract traded at 677.50 cents, about 6.78 dollars per bushel, a rise of roughly 10.8 percent in six sessions, with one session in the middle of the week up…

Liquidity Is Abundant and the Real Cost of Money Keeps Rising.

The June Inflation Report Is the Test.

The US financial system is not short of liquidity. Bank reserves and the other balances Kresmion tracks as net liquidity sit near the top of their range since the spring, close to a full standard deviation above their recent average. Yet in Kresmion's cross…

Speculators Are the Most Net Short the British Pound in a Year.

They Built the Bet in a Single Week.

Speculators are the most net short the British pound in at least a year, and most of that heavily one sided position was built in a single week of trading. In the latest Commitments of Traders data, large speculators held a net short in sterling futures equal…

Treasuries Have Started Moving With Stocks.

The 60/40 Bond Hedge Is Quietly Weakening

The textbook job of a Treasury bond in a portfolio is to zig when stocks zag. That is the whole reason a 60/40 mix exists: when equities fall, bonds are supposed to rise and soften the blow. In practice that relationship has been mildly positive rather than…

Kresmion's Cross Asset Regime Turned Risk-Off Today.

Credit Spreads and Recession Bets Have Not.

Kresmion's cross asset regime model crossed into Risk-Off today for the first time, and the one factor that had been holding it in Neutral was low volatility. The score did not fall because credit cracked or because recession bets jumped. It fell because the…

The Market Prices Today's Fed Decision at 98%.

The Real Event Is Warsh's First Dot Plot.

The Federal Open Market Committee announces its June rate decision at 2:00 p.m. Eastern today, and the deepest market betting on the outcome has gone quiet. On Polymarket, the contract for no change in interest rates holds $9.95 million in volume and prices…

Five Funds Opened New Meta Positions in Q1.

Five Others Trimmed Theirs.

Five large funds opened brand-new Meta positions in the first quarter, a combined 1.23 billion dollars of fresh money, even as five others trimmed theirs. The same quarter that drew Viking Global, Dragoneer, Renaissance Technologies, Third Point and Soros…

Producer Inflation Hit 6.5% in May, the Hottest Since 2022.

The Oil Spike Behind It Is Already Reversing.

Wholesale prices in the United States rose 6.5 percent in the year to May, the hottest reading since November 2022, and most of that increase traces to energy. The Producer Price Index was released on June 11, and the May Consumer Price Index landed a day…

Every Macro Factor Turned Negative This Week.

A Hot Jobs Report Was the Trigger.

Kresmion's cross-asset regime score swung from +0.20 to -0.30 over the past week, and all four of its underlying factors are now negative as of June 8. The model's conviction stepped from MEDIUM to HIGH on June 5 and has held at maximum for four straight…

$2.3 Billion of Bitcoin's Whale Volume Last Week Was Self-Transfer Noise.

The Genuine Flow Ran One Way.

Over the past week, 86% of large Bitcoin exchange transactions on Kresmion-tracked wallets were same-exchange self-transfers, not genuine cross-party flow. Of roughly $2.3 billion in headline "whale movements," about $949 million was real. And nearly all of…

Risk Appetite Rebounded in May.

It Skipped Bitcoin.

US equities closed May at a record high even as US spot Bitcoin ETFs posted their weakest stretch of demand all year, a divergence that defined the month. The risk-on rebound that lifted stocks largely bypassed crypto. The trigger for the recovery was energy.…

Risk Comes Out of the System: Positioning Capitulates as the Oil Shock Fades

The fear that drove markets to de-risk is starting to fade, but the positioning that fear created has not caught up. Cross-venue prediction markets now assign just a 11.77% chance that Bitcoin clears $130,000 by year-end, roughly one in eight. Kresmion's…

Accumulation Without Conviction: Bitcoin Inflows Build, the Market Stays Skeptical

Bitcoin spot ETFs pulled in $1.43 billion of net inflows on May 29, and coins kept leaving exchanges, yet cross-venue prediction markets still price only about a 12% chance that Bitcoin trades above $130,000 by year-end. That gap, real money accumulating…