MARKETS week ahead: July 2 – 8Last week in the news
Both EU and US markets finished the week in green, mostly driven by stocks from the tech industry. June was an extremely good month for the S & P 500, considering that it managed to gain 6.5% during the month, and 15.9% since the beginning of this year. The crypto market was relatively flat during the week, although with good performance of altcoins. BTC is ending the week below FWB:31K , while Ether is holding above $1.9K.
Equity markets in the US continue to be supported by the tech industry. Nvidia is certainly one of currently most interesting companies for investors, however, the biggest news during the previous week was that Apple reached a market cap of $3 trillion, after its share price reached $190.73. Share price of Apple has increased around 49% since the start of this year.
Fidelity investment fund followed the steps of the BlackRock and filed with the SEC for their own BTC ETF. However, the Wall Street Journal reported that SEC returned filings from CBOE and Nasdaq for BTC ETF as being “inadequate” and not sufficiently clear. The major concern of SEC with a BTC ETF is its structure, which needs to be sufficient in order to prevent potential fraudulent and manipulative actions. Spokesman of the CBOE noted that they are planning to update filings and submit them once again. Bitcoin reacted to this news, by modest return to the levels below $30,5K, waiting for positive news in order to bring the price to the higher grounds.
The FED published the results of an annual stress test on banks. The aim of this stress test is to show how resilient are US banks to highly adverse stress scenarios. Stress test is conducted by 23 largest US banks, and included scenarios of unemployment rate surging to 10%, a 40% drop in prices of real estate and 38% decline in housing prices. As per results published by FED, banks were able to sustain a $541 billion in projected losses and still manage to sustain minimum required capital levels.
As CoinDesk is reporting, Kraken has been ordered by the court to provide account information to the IRS for all users which transacted more than $20.000 for the last calendar year. As it has been noted, the aim of these data would be for the IRS to check whether users have filed their taxes properly.
Bloomberg is reporting that Citigroup, one of the largest banks in the world, is in negotiations with Metaco and several other crypto custodians, in order to expand its business to the digital asset area. It is also interesting that Metaco was acquired by company Ripple, which has an ongoing lawsuit with SEC, over its offer of crypto tokens.
Problems for Binance continue, as the market regulator in Belgium ordered Binance to stop offering its services in this country. As it has been noted, the European financial markets regulator, FSMA, stressed that Binance is offering its services to EU clients from countries other than the European Economic Area, which is a violation of the local regulation.
Crypto market cap
It is still a game of nerves on the crypto market when dealing with regulators is in question. BlackRock was the first one to start another round of filing for spot BTC ETF. Several companies followed the move, among which were Fidelity fund, CBOE and Nasdaq. Based on news from the previous week, SEC rejected CBOE`s and Nasdaq`s filings as “inadequate”. The major issue for SEC continues to be the structure of the product which might allow potential fraudulent and manipulative actions. CBOE officials noted that they will update filings and start another round of the process for gaining the approval for BTC ETF product. Initial market positive sentiment is currently on hold, until it is finally resolved with the latest round of filings for the first spot BTC ETF. On the other side, the market is still waiting for the resolution of the Deutsche bank filing with German regulators for the license to conduct a custody service for digital assets, including crypto currencies. During the previous week total crypto market capitalization stayed almost flat, with a modest increase of 1% or FWB:14B on a weekly basis. Interestingly, daily trading volumes were further increased to the level of $94B on a daily basis, from $80B during the previous week and $60B from two weeks ago. This is positive signal that investors are back on the crypto market. Total crypto market capitalization increased since the beginning of this year by 53%, where it has been added total $402B to the market cap.
During the previous period, Bitcoin was a leader of the crypto market capitalization increase, however, during the previous week altcoins were the one in the spotlight of investors. BTC finished the week flat compared to the end of the previous week. But, the absolute gainer of the week was actually Bitcoin Cash, which gained an incredible 56% on a weekly basis, adding more than $2B to its market cap. ETH also finished the week in green, with an increase in cap of more than $4B or 1.8%, and was followed by Litecoin with a gain of $1.2B or 19% in the market cap. Binance Coin managed to recover some of previous losses, by increasing its value by 4.7% or $1.7B w/w. Few other coins with good weekly performance were Bitcoin Gold, with a surge of 18.8% in cap, Stellar was up by 18.6%, ZCash gained 19.5%, Uniswap was up by 16% and Maker returned to the crypto game with an surge in value by 24.2% on a weekly basis. There have been only a few losers during the week, like Algorand, with a drop in value of 7%, OMG Network was down by 13%, and XRP lost almost 3% in value. There has been increased activity when coins in circulation are in question. Stellar increased its circulating coins by 0.4%, Algorand gained a significant 1.8%, Filecoin was up by 0.2% same as Polkadot and Tether.
Crypto futures market
BTC futures gained significantly during the last few weeks, but the previous week was a sort of short-term halt, when both spot and futures markets were in question. BTC short term futures were down approximately 1.5% from the week before, while December 2023 is still holding above $31K. On the other side, futures with longer term maturity gained some 1.5%, which is positive for this coin. It shows that investors see some prospectus for BTC in the future period. Futures maturing in December 2024 were closed at price $32.930, which is 1.5% higher from previous week`s close at $32.425.
Situation with ETH futures is opposite to developments with BTC futures. Those maturing in July and August this year were up by 1.25% and 1.45% respectively, however, all other maturities were traded lower from the week before. Futures maturing in December this year were traded 0.78% lower, finishing the week at a price of $1.908. At the same time, futures maturing in December next year were closed at price $1.940 and 1.12% lower from the week before. Spread between futures maturing in July this year and December next year is almost zero, which shows that investors are still not sure about future prospectus for this coin.
