The calm this bond volatility breaks is the collateral holding up global liquidity. On Michael Howell’s October 6 count, global liquidity set yet another record number, while the collateral base underneath keeps shrinking at an accelerating pace. Currently, the Shadow Monetary Base serving as collateral for this record headline liquidity sits at its lowest in 16 months. Since August, record headline liquidity comes from more lending against the same base collateral. This collateral multiplier churns liquidity into the economy on calm bonds. The calm is over. Sustained higher bond volatility could impact global liquidity negatively in Q4 2026.

The long end did not wait for the data to confirm the collateral troubles. On October 5 the ten-year Treasury yield rose to 5.34% and the thirty-year to 5.7%, both the highest since 2002. The Federal Reserve (Fed) spent the week asking for more time. We remember asking the market for time at Hayloo several times. The market never listened.

On our use of AI:

We’re a private crypto fund out of Switzerland. We built a Neurosymbolic Compound AI System for our own desk: it follows our strategies, it reads the news that affect our portfolio, it sits on a database going back decades, and brings math to our everyday emotions. We call it Hayloo. It’s our best hire. This Substack is compiled by Hayloo and approved by us.

Humans have written machine-assisted for centuries. What never changes is who decides.

Nothing at Hayloo INC. was ever decided by a machine. What we publish is what we defend as a team. When it’s wrong, it’s wrong because humans signed it.

Jordi Federer, Founder, Hayloo INC.

This week’s read opens on the test our team set in September and what happened when it landed. It carries the collateral base’s third negative report, impacting liquidity in Q4 2026. We’re talking about the long end at 2002 highs, a war that reached the Red Sea, the Gulf building a detour around a closed strait, gold’s worst week since June, yet stocks a third of a percent from their record, carried by a narrow group of AI companies, now facing higher borrowing cost.

A newsreader that ranks each morning’s news from Hayloo’s sources and keeps six months of it for your AI is being built. Join the waitlist.

Our Team Splits on Whether Loud Bonds Will Break the Record

Since September our team has read the record liquidity headline two ways. Julian Harlow, our Global Liquidity Director, reads a headline held up over a shrinking base as a plateau. Priya Sandoval, our Capital Flow Analyst, reads the same headline as fuel for risk assets this quarter. What we like about granular liquidity measures beyond the M2 money supply is the crystal ball they give us. Liquidity takes time to reach markets. In September we wrote that a weekly close in bond volatility above 100 would threaten record liquidity, because volatile bonds raise the haircuts lenders take on collateral, and higher haircuts pull the collateral multiplier down.

Bond volatility has now closed above 100 twice: 104.58 for the week of September 27 and 110 for the week of October 4. But the collateral multiplier has not moved yet. The rise in bond volatility has yet to feed through the system to reach collateral haircuts. Equities sit 0.32% from their own record. Their liquidity cushion is intact. But the record sits on a one-legged foundation that just started to shake.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow) · Capital Flow Analyst (Priya Sandoval)

Liquidity Tape: The Base Shrank Again Under Another Record

Michael Howell‘s October 6 update puts global liquidity at another record, a little above the week before. Its three-month annualized growth picked up and its annual growth held steady, both well below their mid-summer pace. The base underneath, central-bank money plus high-grade collateral, sits at its lowest in 16 months. Both of its growth rates sank further below zero. Howell puts the latest dip down to weaker bond collateral values and a firmer dollar.

Both of the collateral base’s growth rates were negative three weekly reports in a row. We call a rollover only when that happens and the headline itself falls. The headline set a record, so the test isn’t met.

We read the global liquidity setting as a squeeze. The base is contracting while the cost of debt rises: the thirty-year Treasury closed its week at 5.63%, the U.S. mortgage rate stood at 7.30% in the week to September 25, and euro-area inflation rose to 3.8%. Policy has no room to ease into that.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow)

Macro Tape: The Long End Broke Out While the Fed Asked for Time

The thirty-year Treasury closed the week to October 2 at 5.63%, from 5.49%. The ten-year real yield, what the bond pays after inflation, closed at 2.92%, from 2.83%. Citadel Securities’ Nohshad Shah wrote on October 5 that almost all of September’s rise in the ten-year came from real yields, with inflation expectations steady. In our read, a strong economy is pushing long rates up.

The rest of the world sold along the U.S.. Britain’s thirty-year gilt touched 6% on October 1. France’s ten-year spread over Germany reached 137 basis points on October 5, against 85 a month earlier, and U.S. municipal bonds had their worst month in nearly two decades. Japan set the coupon on its new ten-year bond at 3.1%, against 2.1% in January to March, and bidders still covered the auction 3.76 times against a 12-month average of 3.21. That money has been funding foreign governments’ deficits, the U.S. included, in the past, and it now earns better at home.

At the Fed, Vice Chair Philip Jefferson said on October 1 that it may take more time to judge whether more hikes are needed. Odds of a move at the October 28 meeting fell to 30% from 70%, and odds of at least one hike by year-end to 80% from 95%, as CoinDesk reported. Markets tend to remind the laggards that it’s the markets that set the clock, not the Fed.

After September payrolls came in at 29,000, bond traders priced a later start to further hikes. Currently, the two-year yield is pricing up to three more quarter-point hikes over the next year, which leaves the Fed behind the curve.

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

Geopolitical Tape: Three Carriers Sail, and the War Reached the Red Sea

Carrot and stick are both present at the same time around Iran. A U.S. official told Al Jazeera that three aircraft carriers and two amphibious groups will be in position by the end of November. In the same week Iran’s foreign minister offered, in private talks, to restore nuclear inspectors’ access in exchange for sanctions relief, and the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Iran’s rail and auto groups. Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said the Strait of Hormuz stays shut until seven conditions from a June interim agreement are met. The fighting now reaches the Red Sea route as well as Hormuz.

At home, support for the war is thin. In an Associated Press survey, 70% of U.S. adults say the war has not been worth fighting, and a Reuters poll has registered voters preferring Democrats 44% to 37%. The November 3 midterms stay the war’s last remaining dated gate.

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Commodity Tape: The Gulf Built a Detour Around a Closed Strait

WTI, the U.S. crude benchmark, read $89.23 on October 5. That is 21.60% above its 100-week average of $73.38, and that average rose 2.97% over thirteen weeks. The weekly close of $90.80 on October 4 was the twelfth straight above it, in a run that started on July 17. Brent traded at $100.88 on October 6.

The Gulf is moving its oil around the shut strait. Kpler counted Middle East crude exports of 19.5 to 22.5 million barrels a day on four days in the last week of September, against about 18 million before the war, and Gulf flows excluding Iran ran above 81% of pre-war levels in September.

In our read the shrinking gap between crude and its long average comes from barrels rerouted around a strait that is still closed. One strike would reverse it.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

Hard Assets: Gold Fell to the Dollar, and Bitcoin Closed Above 20×

Gold read $4,169 on October 5, 2.23% under its 20-week average of $4,264.23, as traders weighed the stronger dollar and higher yields.

Our team splits on what moved gold. Julian Harlow sides with Michael Howell: a People’s Bank of China (PBoC) liquidity print through the third quarter should lift gold into the fourth. Marcus Vasquez, our Hard Asset Strategist, reads September’s fall as a dollar and real-yield story, unconsidered what the PBoC is buying.

Gold priced in oil reads 46.72×. The ratio that must give in for a healthy economy stopped falling, and it sits at more than twice the long-run level of about 20×.

Bitcoin priced in gold closed the week of October 4 at 20.75×, an early-bull level, challenged by macroeconomic reallocations and geopolitical turmoil. We respect the ratio, but we can’t ignore the fact that the move came as much from gold falling as from Bitcoin rising.

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Equity Tape: A Third of a Percent From the Record, Every Long Line Rising

The S&P 500 closed at 7,774 on October 5, 0.32% below its August 13 record close of 7,798.99. The Nasdaq 100 set a record, and Nvidia’s market value reached $5.76 trillion. Volume on October 5 was 3.47 billion shares against a 20-day average of 3.23 billion.

Lukas Marchetti, our Technical Analyst, reads the structure as intact. The 50-, 100-, and 200-day averages are all rising and the index sits above each of them. The index’s lead over the long averages, however, narrowed, and the 20-day average is still falling.

A narrow group carries the entire index, as demand for artificial intelligence (AI) keeps rising. The money for the AI build keeps flowing, at a higher price. JPMorgan is marketing a $5 billion loan for Volta Infrastructure at a yield of about 11%. Stonebriar sold $869 million of asset-backed securities, about 15% of them backed by AI chip loans. OpenAI is seeking $30 billion at a value of about $1.4 trillion, and Anthropic is targeting an initial public offering as soon as mid-November. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told the U.K. to prepare for market shocks from an AI correction.

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

What We’re Watching

We’re curious about the upcoming reads of the collateral multiplier, after bond volatility briefly hit 114. Our risk-off trigger stands until the MOVE index closes a week back under its 200-week average. The September consumer and producer price prints will give insight into whether refined fuel is driving inflation and test the thirty-year above 5.5% on weekly closes. We’re looking out for prints of Japanese net selling of foreign bonds, and we’re watching gold at $4,000, currently 4.22% above.

Our Sources This Week

This week the desk read Michael Howell’s Global Liquidity update of October 6 and his pieces of October 2 and October 5. Subscribe to Howell’s research for his full data.

Our book is short Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana. People behind Hayloo may hold any asset discussed here, in either direction. Nothing here is advice to buy or sell.

The Team

Jordi Federer — Lead Trader. Owns the book and the publication. Sizing, staging, and every decision that moves capital.

Theodore Brennan — Chief Macro Strategist. Central-bank reaction functions, the dollar, and the rate path.

Julian Harlow — Global Liquidity Director. The liquidity engine, the collateral multiplier, and the transmission lag into price.

Margaux Lindqvist — Geopolitical Intelligence Officer. State behavior, escalation mechanics, and the tails that reprice commodities.

Marcus Vasquez — Hard Asset Strategist. Gold, the debasement basket, and the hard-money ratios.

Sienna Whitfield — Inflation & Real Asset Analyst. Energy, the inflation impulse, and the real-asset complex.

Priya Sandoval — Capital Flow Analyst. Fund flows, positioning, derivatives, and where the marginal dollar comes from.

Charlotte Donovan — Fundamental Research Analyst. On-chain cohorts, cost bases, and the structural read beneath the tape.

Lukas Marchetti — Technical Analyst. Market structure, moving-average regimes, and the levels that fire.

Disclaimer

The information is provided for information purposes only and on the basis that it will not be relied upon. No information contained herein constitutes a personal recommendation or investment advice.

The information (including any expressions of opinion or forecast) has been obtained from, or is based on, sources believed by the author to be reliable, but are not guaranteed as to their accuracy or completeness and should not be relied upon. The information is provided without obligation on the part of the author and on the understanding that any person who acts upon it or changes his investment position in reliance on it does so entirely at his own risk. The information does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Information is current only as at the date it is first posted and may no longer be true or complete when viewed by you. All information may be changed or amended without prior notice.

No representation, warranty or undertaking is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information by the author and no liability is accepted by the author for the accuracy or completeness of such information. In no event will the author be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of any use of the information, including, without limitation, any lost profits.

You should be aware that the Internet is not a completely reliable transmission medium. The author does not accept any liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the product or services referred to herein.

The materials provided here including text, photographs and other images, are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property rights. All copyright (and any other intellectual property rights) in these materials is either owned by the author, or is used by the author under licence.

Here is what that flow looks like from the inside. A Japanese insurer that can earn more on a bond at home can sell a U.S. Treasury to buy it. In our reading that choice turns on Tokyo’s yields, and nothing the Federal Reserve (Fed) does or says will change it. Tokyo also sent a signal the other way. On September 29 Japan’s 40-year auction drew its strongest demand in six years. Our team reads that auction two ways. The number that settles it is the size of Japanese net selling of foreign bonds.

The selling in long bonds ran around the world. Britain paid its highest yield since 1999 at a ten-year auction. France’s premium over Germany reached 120 basis points, with a record €340 billion of bonds planned for 2027. Australia’s central bank raised its rate to 4.6% on September 29, its highest since 2011.

The Fed spent the week talking. Governor Michael Barr said again on September 29 that further rate increases are likely needed. John Williams of the New York Fed said on the same day that his base case is one more increase this year, with no urgency. The two-year Treasury yield slipped to 4.88% from 4.96%, and the thirty-year barely moved.

We run a crypto fund, and our team reads the bond market before anyone at the desk opens a Bitcoin chart. Treasuries are the collateral much of the world borrows against. In our read, a large seller of them reaches every market built on that borrowing, crypto included.

On our use of AI:

We’re a private crypto fund out of Switzerland. We built a Neurosymbolic Compound AI System for our own desk: it follows our strategies, it reads the news that affect our portfolio, it sits on a database going back decades, and brings math to our everyday emotions. We call it Hayloo. It’s our best hire. This Substack is compiled by Hayloo and approved by us.

Humans have written machine-assisted for centuries. What never changes is who decides.

Nothing at Hayloo INC. was ever decided by a machine.

What we publish is what we defend as a team. When it’s wrong, it’s wrong because humans signed it.

Jordi Federer, Founder, Hayloo INC.

hayloo.org

This week’s read opens on both sides of our split over Japan, and on what the bond market’s gauge of calm did this week. It gives the date that fires our trigger, and the windows when we expect the pressure to reach risk assets. It carries the rest of the desk’s week as well: Washington’s answer on Hormuz, diesel at records, gold under its line, and the junk bonds now paying for the artificial intelligence (AI) build.

Our book is short Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana. People behind Hayloo may hold any asset discussed here, in either direction. Nothing here is advice to buy or sell.

A newsreader that ranks each morning’s news from Hayloo’s sources and keeps six months of it for your AI is being built. Join the waitlist.

Our Team Splits on How Big Japan’s Flow Is

Priya Sandoval, our Capital Flow Analyst, reads this week’s news from Japan as the start of a Treasury-market event, because a Japanese insurer selling Treasuries to buy a bond at home doesn’t care what the Fed says next. Margaux Lindqvist, our Geopolitical Intelligence Officer, wants a size before she calls it a flow. She reads Japan’s 40-year auction on September 29, its strongest demand in six years, as money staying home. The number that settles it is the size of Japanese net selling of foreign bonds, including the largest foreign stash of U.S. Treasuries.

— Capital Flow Analyst (Priya Sandoval) · Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Liquidity Tape: Why Tokyo Reaches a Crypto Fund

Record global liquidity stands on one lever, and a large seller of Treasuries would pull it. On Michael Howell‘s count, the world’s money hit a record this week, while the base underneath it, central-bank money and collateral, shrank to its lowest in more than a year. We ran the split on Howell’s own weekly table. Since mid-July the base has shrunk by about as much as the headline has grown, and every dollar of the headline’s growth came from the collateral multiplier, which now sits at a record in his data going back to 2010. The multiplier lives on calm bonds, because lower Treasury volatility means smaller haircuts and more lending against the same collateral.

This week Treasury volatility closed a week above its line. The MOVE index (the Merrill Lynch Option Volatility Estimate), which Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) publishes, prices the swings traders expect in Treasuries. On ICE’s index, Treasury volatility closed the week of September 27 above its 200-week average for the first time since March, after about half a year of weekly closes under it. One weekly close above that line is our alert. A second, in the week ending October 4, is our trigger.

By our own test, the world’s money hasn’t rolled over yet. We call a rollover only on three weekly prints in a row that show both of the base’s growth rates negative and the headline itself lower. The headline sits at a record, so the test isn’t met. We read the setting around it as a squeeze. Inflation expectations, government bond yields around the world, and mortgage rates are all rising, so policy has no room to ease a stalling engine. On Howell’s September 29 update, the base’s three-month rate sank further this week and its annual rate went deeper below zero. We expect pressure on risk assets in Q4 2026.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow)

Macro Tape: The Long End Kept Selling While the Fed Talked

The thirty-year Treasury closed the week of September 25 at 5.49%, its highest weekly close since May 2002, and printed 5.56% on September 28. The ten-year closed September 23 at 5.11%, up 15 basis points in a session after a weak $70 billion five-year auction. The ten-year real yield, what the bond pays after inflation, reached 2.90% on September 28.

The market’s odds of a hike in October fell from better than two in three to about even. Theodore Brennan, our Chief Macro Strategist, reads the two-year as a bet on the Fed’s next move. In his read the thirty-year is pricing the supply of government debt and the price of energy.

Long Treasuries could pay a strong return over the next twelve months, because history shows the real economy breaking as long rates approach the level the thirty-year just printed through. Julian Harlow, our Global Liquidity Director, reads the next large move in yields as down, delivered by a growth scare. Sienna Whitfield, our Inflation and Real Asset Analyst, says the inputs haven’t turned. One-year consumer inflation expectations jumped to 4.6% from 4.0%. Diesel set records on both sides of the Atlantic, Spain printed 4.9% inflation and France 3.0% in September, and Barclays and RBC both put a 6% thirty-year yield in range. Our reading is that both roads to lower yields run through weaker growth, and neither is kind to risk assets this quarter.

The real economy is splitting in two. On S&P Global‘s flash survey, the U.S. composite purchasing managers’ index reached 58.4 in September, its highest since July 2021, and jobless claims fell to 197,000. Households went the other way. Consumer confidence fell to its lowest since 2014 on the Conference Board‘s survey, sentiment fell to 48.1 from 51.7 on the University of Michigan‘s, and the thirty-year mortgage rate reached 7.12%, its highest since May 2024. Output runs hot while households pay the energy bill and the borrowing cost, and in our read housing and the consumer break first. Job openings fell to a five-month low in the same stretch.

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

Geopolitical Tape: Tehran Named Its Price, and Washington Passed

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian told the United Nations General Assembly on September 23 that Hormuz stays closed while sanctions and the U.S. blockade stand. That made the blockade the price of the strait. On September 24 negotiators were reported to be exploring that exact trade, the strait for the blockade. The same day the Houthis claimed strikes on Saudi Aramco facilities at Yanbu, the Red Sea end of the kingdom’s pipeline around the strait. On September 26 President Trump rejected Iran’s seven-day proposal, and explosions were reported near Qeshm Island within hours. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi asked for Washington’s final answer by September 29, and a U.S. official said no agreement comes without the nuclear program on the table. That being said, the November 3 midterms remain the war’s dated gate.

Trade brought no relief. Washington and Beijing extended their truce by two months, to January 10, after a state visit that released no concrete agreements. Soybeans stayed off the lists of goods recommended for tariff cuts, and rare earths were pushed to another round. Talk about getting sh*t done.

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Commodity Tape: Saudi Pipes Moved the Barrel, and Diesel Set Records

West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the U.S. crude benchmark, closed at $89.28 on September 29. That is 12.9% under its $102.45 weekly close of September 13, and the war has not ended. It still sits 22.0% above its 100-week average of $73.18, and that average is 2.6% higher than it was thirteen weeks ago. Eleven straight completed weekly closes sit above it, from July 17 through the $93.39 close of September 27.

Plumbing moved the barrel. Saudi Arabia restored about half the flow through its East-West pipeline, which runs around Hormuz, and then resumed flows through it. The recovery rests on infrastructure one strike can take out again, and the Houthis hit its Red Sea end on September 24.

Diesel is where the war lands on prices. U.S. retail diesel topped $6.50 a gallon on September 23, a record. Europe’s diesel premium over Brent crude passed $95 a barrel the same day, a record in data back to 2011, and the European Union’s average pump price for diesel hit a record €2.23 a liter. Sienna Whitfield reads the shortage as one of refining capacity, so an export ban would reshuffle the queue for diesel and add no volume to it. The White House denied a report of such a ban, and President Trump then said he is still considering one.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

Hard Assets: Gold Slipped Under Its Line on Real Yields

Gold reads $4,191, 2.2% under its 20-week average of $4,283.81, and its September 27 weekly close of $4,260.93 also finished under the line. Spot fell 3.3% to $4,146.51 on September 28, its lowest since August 5. Our floor sits at $4,000, 4.8% below, with a deep floor at $3,700.

Marcus Vasquez, our Hard Asset Strategist, reads a rate story first. The ten-year real yield rose to 2.90% and the dollar had its best month since June, and both raise the cost of holding a metal that pays nothing. Beijing is the second leg. Gold follows the liquidity the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) pumps, and the injections have slowed. If gold falls on rates while the Chinese tap stays open, our floor holds. A slowing tap puts the floor in play. The PBoC’s record overnight lending window from September 28 to October 8, capped at 1 trillion yuan a day, is the next read on the tap.

Gold priced in oil reads 46.94×. On weekly closes it fell from 53.13× at the end of August to 42.73× on September 13, then climbed back to 45.63× at the September 27 close, because crude has fallen 12.9% since the September 13 close and gold only 4.3%. Howell expects the ratio to keep falling toward a long-run center near 20× as industrial demand takes over. We agree on where it ends up and part ways on the last fortnight: the driver right now is Saudi logistics, and one strike can send it back the other way.

Bitcoin priced in gold reads 19.96× on live marks and 19.82× on the September 27 weekly close. Last week’s live print touched the 20× line our desk calls early-bull, and on a weekly close it still hasn’t crossed. Outside gold the commodity run continues, with copper and the broad commodity index having very large years.

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Equity Tape: Stocks Hold Above Rising Lines While the AI Build Borrows From the Junk Market

Lukas Marchetti, our Technical Analyst, reads the S&P 500’s structure as intact. The index hasn’t made a new high since its August 13 record, and it has gone nowhere since then while its long averages kept rising. It sits just above its 20-day average and above rising 50-, 100-, and 200-day averages, and it hasn’t closed under the 100-day or the 200-day since April. More than half of this month’s sessions, however, closed under the 20-day average, and the gap to each of the three longer lines keeps shrinking.

Earnings are holding the index up while valuation multiples compressed. Theodore Brennan points to what the index hasn’t priced. Long rates at two-decade highs raise the bar for those earnings. Wells Fargo cut its year-end target for the index to barely above where it closed on September 28. U.S. industrial stocks fell hard over the past month, and Citigroup’s earnings-revision index turned net negative on September 23 for the first time in 23 weeks.

The AI bill is on paper now, and junk bonds are paying it. SoftBank sold $11.1 billion of high-yield bonds on September 23, the largest such sale on record, to fund a stake in OpenAI. Anthropic’s initial public offering prospectus sets out $518 billion of planned spending against a 2025 net loss of $42 billion. Goldman Sachs’s credit strategists say the supply has pushed high-yield risk premiums to a five-month high. Protection on Nvidia’s debt changed hands for $6.9 billion in six months, against $640 million in the six months before. Oracle sent a force-majeure notice to a New Mexico data-center developer on September 27. Capital spending financed through credit reprices in credit first, and we will judge it by what that paper trades at a month from now.

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

What We’re Watching

A second weekly close in bond volatility above its 200-week average on October 4 is our trigger. Howell’s next flash print tells us whether the multiplier held its record or came off it. The size of Japanese net selling of foreign bonds settles the split between Priya Sandoval and Margaux Lindqvist. The PBoC’s overnight window runs to October 8 and tells Marcus Vasquez whether the Chinese tap is open. Gold’s floor sits at $4,000. The strait stays the war’s open question until the November 3 midterms, and the price of the AI build’s junk bonds a month from now tells us how credit is taking it.

Our Sources This Week

This week the desk read Michael Howell’s Global Liquidity update of September 29 and his piece of September 27. Subscribe to Howell’s research for his full data.

Our book is short Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana. People behind Hayloo may hold any asset discussed here, in either direction. Nothing here is advice to buy or sell.

A newsreader that ranks each morning’s news from Hayloo’s sources and keeps six months of it for your AI is being built. Join the waitlist.

The Team

Jordi Federer — Lead Trader. Owns the book and the publication. Sizing, staging, and every decision that moves capital.

Theodore Brennan — Chief Macro Strategist. Central-bank reaction functions, the dollar, and the rate path.

Julian Harlow — Global Liquidity Director. The liquidity engine, the collateral multiplier, and the transmission lag into price.

Margaux Lindqvist — Geopolitical Intelligence Officer. State behavior, escalation mechanics, and the tails that reprice commodities.

Marcus Vasquez — Hard Asset Strategist. Gold, the debasement basket, and the hard-money ratios.

Sienna Whitfield — Inflation & Real Asset Analyst. Energy, the inflation impulse, and the real-asset complex.

Priya Sandoval — Capital Flow Analyst. Fund flows, positioning, derivatives, and where the marginal dollar comes from.

Charlotte Donovan — Fundamental Research Analyst. On-chain cohorts, cost bases, and the structural read beneath the tape.

Lukas Marchetti — Technical Analyst. Market structure, moving-average regimes, and the levels that fire.

Disclaimer

The information is provided for information purposes only and on the basis that it will not be relied upon. No information contained herein constitutes a personal recommendation or investment advice.

The information (including any expressions of opinion or forecast) has been obtained from, or is based on, sources believed by the author to be reliable, but are not guaranteed as to their accuracy or completeness and should not be relied upon. The information is provided without obligation on the part of the author and on the understanding that any person who acts upon it or changes his investment position in reliance on it does so entirely at his own risk. The information does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Information is current only as at the date it is first posted and may no longer be true or complete when viewed by you. All information may be changed or amended without prior notice.

No representation, warranty or undertaking is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information by the author and no liability is accepted by the author for the accuracy or completeness of such information. In no event will the author be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of any use of the information, including, without limitation, any lost profits.

You should be aware that the Internet is not a completely reliable transmission medium. The author does not accept any liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the product or services referred to herein.

The materials provided here including text, photographs and other images, are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property rights. All copyright (and any other intellectual property rights) in these materials is either owned by the author, or is used by the author under licence.

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Liquidity Tape: The Money Machine Is Running on Fumes

Global liquidity set a record at $196.2 trillion in Michael Howell’s September 22 Global Liquidity Index (GLI) update, and the Shadow Monetary Base under it fell for a third straight week. The base, central-bank money plus the collateral the system borrows against, slipped to $109.2 trillion from $109.4 trillion. Its three-month rate went to −2.6% from +1.2% and its annual rate to −0.4% from −0.1%, so both legs are negative for the second time this month. The headline’s three-month rate picked up to 4.3% from 3.2%.

We ran the split from the weekly rows of Howell’s own table. From August 21 to September 18 the headline rose 0.25% and the base fell 0.36%, and the collateral multiplier, headline over base, moved to 1.797 from 1.786. Howell puts it at 1.80, the highest in his records back to 2010. The month’s headline growth came entirely from each dollar of base carrying more borrowing, with no new money.

The multiplier rests on quiet bonds. The MOVE index (the Merrill Lynch Option Volatility Estimate, the market’s price for Treasury swings) touched 84 before the Fed’s September 16 decision and fell back to 76 after it, inside the 70-to-80 range it has held since April and well under its average near 100 since 2022.

Howell’s September 20 essay puts a price on that calm. Advanced-economy debt runs at about twice system liquidity. Moves above roughly 2.2 times have come before financial stress, and moves toward 1.8 times have come with bubbles. The first warnings on his list are repo spikes and jumps in bond volatility, with wider credit spreads confirming later. A record multiplier held up by suppressed bond volatility sits on the first item of that list.

The Hayloo team reads the record liquidity number two ways. The Global Liquidity Director reads a headline standing on one lever over a shrinking base as a plateau. The Capital Flow Analyst points to the series Howell charts the headline against, world equities about a quarter ahead, where the headline’s three-month growth just accelerated, and reads support for risk assets into the fourth quarter. The lever settles it: a MOVE close above 100 pulls the multiplier down, and with the base already shrinking, the headline follows.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow)

On our use of AI:

We’re a private crypto fund out of Switzerland. We built a Neurosymbolic Compound AI System for our own desk: it follows our strategies, it reads the news that affect our portfolio, it sits on a database going back decades, and brings math to our everyday emotions. We call it Hayloo. It’s our best hire. This Substack is compiled by Hayloo and approved by us.

Humans have written machine-assisted for centuries. What never changes is who decides.

Nothing at Hayloo INC. was ever decided by a machine.

What we publish is what we defend as a team. When it’s wrong, it’s wrong because humans signed it.

Jordi Federer, Founder, Hayloo INC.

hayloo.org

Macro Tape: The Thirty-Year Kicked the Door Down

The Fed raised its range to 3.75%–4.00% on September 16, and its regional presidents spent the week arguing for more. St. Louis’s Alberto Musalem said further increases may be needed and policy may still be stimulating the economy. Richmond’s Tom Barkin said elevated pressure risks becoming entrenched. Chicago’s Austan Goolsbee said the Fed cannot ignore repeated supply shocks and may have to cause hardship. Minneapolis’s Neel Kashkari said the pressure has broadened beyond oil. Traders are buying protection against the Fed hiking less than priced and moving money into short-dated Treasuries, and Goldman Sachs expects another hike in October.

The ceiling our September 10 watchlist carried at 5.27% broke. The thirty-year’s weekly close was 5.35% for the week of September 11 and 5.34% for the week of September 18. Pimco says thirty-year yields above 5% are leading it to trim its underweight, and Canada sold long bonds at the highest yield in 19 years.

Abroad the week added tightening. The Bank of Japan went to 1.25% on September 18 on a 7–2 vote, and the dollar went above 157 yen on the split. Economists expect a final European Central Bank hike in December.

The real economy gives them no reason to stop. U.S. initial jobless claims were 196,000 for the week to September 12. The Philadelphia Fed’s factory index fell to 37.8 from 47.4 and August manufacturing output slipped 0.3%. But Germany’s and France’s September activity beat, U.K. retail sales rose 0.5% in August, India’s flash survey accelerated, and South Korea’s early-September exports set a record. Demand does not need cuts. And a strong real economy pulls money out of financial markets.

The desk splits on crude. The Chief Macro Strategist reads its drop from $101.61 on September 16 to $89.67 on September 22 as the first input in months that gives the Fed room, which would ease the squeeze before year-end. The Inflation & Real Asset Analyst reads the record diesel price on the same tape as the committee’s real problem, and Kashkari’s line as proof the Fed sees it. The next consumer and producer price prints settle it, along with whether diesel follows crude down.

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

Geopolitical Tape: Tehran Set a Seven-Day Clock and Washington Called

Iran put a clock on the strait on September 22. A senior Iranian official said Tehran can reopen Hormuz within seven days if Washington eases military pressure and lifts its blockade of Iranian ports. The same day Donald Trump repeated his annihilate-or-deal framing at the United Nations General Assembly, and his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner spent three hours with Iranian officials through Qatari mediators. By September 23 no breakthrough had been reported, and the strait is still shut.

Ukraine fired more than 1,000 drones at Russia on the night of September 19 and hit the Moscow Oil Refinery, and Russia is set to extend its ban on most diesel exports. Kyiv’s strikes now show up at American pumps.

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Commodity Tape: Crude Crashed, Diesel Partied, and Nobody Got Relief

West Texas Intermediate fell to $89.67 on September 22 from $101.61 on September 16, and the war did not end. It still sits 22.92% above its 100-week line at $72.95, and the line has climbed 2.21% over thirteen weeks from $71.37. Ten completed weekly closes now sit above it, the latest $95.89 for the week ended September 20.

What moved the barrel was plumbing. Saudi crude has been loading ship-to-ship off Oman’s Sohar port since the East-West pipeline shut on September 11. Aramco told Asian refiners they will soon load at Yanbu on the Red Sea again, and on September 23 the kingdom moved to restart the pipeline. The Hormuz counts disagree: shipping data reported by Reuters showed a dozen commodity vessels through over the September 19–20 weekend against 35 the weekend before, while a U.S. regional commander said oil and liquefied natural gas shipments over the past two weeks were the highest in six months.

U.S. retail diesel topped $6.50 a gallon on September 21, a record, on crude’s fourth straight down day, after setting a record at $5.85 on September 4. The refinery constraint now sits in Russia, in the Gulf, and in the U.S. itself, and a cheaper barrel does not reach a freight bill. Qatar’s central bank governor says its gas plants could take two to three years to repair, and marine insurance costs are up 30% to 40% on the year, per the insurer AXIS.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

Hard Assets: Bitcoin Touched 20× Gold and Nobody Rang the Bell

Gold held while oil moved both ratios. The metal reads $4,304 on our live mark, 0.27% under its 20-week line, and its completed weekly close of $4,385.89 sits 1.63% above that line.

Beijing is still the buyer. China’s gold imports passed 1,000 tons this year, and the yuan held at 6.709 per dollar in Howell’s cross-rates while the dollar firmed against every other major. New York copper futures set an all-time high on tight Chinese supply.

Gold over oil widened to 48.00 barrels an ounce from 41.95 a week earlier, and the move came from the oil side. That is more than twice the healthy long-run level of about 20.

Bitcoin over gold reads 20.02× on our live marks, from 17.86× a week earlier, the first print at the 20× line this desk calls early-bull. On completed weekly closes, $81,169 over $4,385.89 reads 18.51×. The Hard Asset Strategist calls the line crossed only on a weekly close.

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Equity Tape: AI Went Shopping in the Junk Aisle

The S&P 500 spent nine straight sessions under its 20-day line into September 18, then closed September 21 at 7,764.70, 1.32% above the line at 7,663.41 and 0.44% under its August 13 high of 7,798.99. The Nasdaq 100 set its first record since June the same day, led by chipmakers after early success for Meta’s Muse agent, and the same agent sent banks, insurers, and online travel names lower on disruption fears. The S&P 500 closed flat on September 22.

The 20-day line is still falling while the 50-, 100-, and 200-day lines rise, and 71.4% of the last 21 closes sat under the 20-day.

The financing under the rally moved further down the credit ladder. SoftBank is seeking more than $11 billion in one of the largest junk bond deals ever to fund its OpenAI stake, and Goldman Sachs launched a $1.1 billion junk bond for a Blue Owl data center leased to CoreWeave. Apollo capped redemptions from a private credit fund for a third straight quarter after 14.7% of investors asked to leave. Two initial public offerings were delayed to wait for Anthropic’s debut. The Bank of England’s Sarah Breeden says regulators are running out of time on the risk of AI agents triggering a market meltdown, and Nvidia trades at half its 2025 multiple.

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

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Disclaimer

The information is provided for information purposes only and on the basis that it will not be relied upon. No information contained herein constitutes a personal recommendation or investment advice.

The information (including any expressions of opinion or forecast) has been obtained from, or is based on, sources believed by the author to be reliable, but are not guaranteed as to their accuracy or completeness and should not be relied upon. The information is provided without obligation on the part of the author and on the understanding that any person who acts upon it or changes his investment position in reliance on it does so entirely at his own risk. The information does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Information is current only as at the date it is first posted and may no longer be true or complete when viewed by you. All information may be changed or amended without prior notice.

No representation, warranty or undertaking is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information by the author and no liability is accepted by the author for the accuracy or completeness of such information. In no event will the author be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of any use of the information, including, without limitation, any lost profits.

You should be aware that the Internet is not a completely reliable transmission medium. The author does not accept any liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the product or services referred to herein.

The materials provided here including text, photographs and other images, are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property rights. All copyright (and any other intellectual property rights) in these materials is either owned by the author, or is used by the author under licence.

Tape of the Week

The ten-year Treasury yield reached 5.04% on September 15, its highest since 2007. The Federal Reserve met the next morning and raised a quarter point, twelve votes to none. Long money repriced itself ahead of the Fed. The board only got to confirm with a vote. The ten-year gave nine basis points back on the 17th, to 4.95%. The mechanics are working.

The Treasury did try to hold the long end down, and it failed publicly: a buyback three times the usual size, and the long end has since reached its highest yield in nineteen years 5.35% on the weekly close.

The prices doing all the damage are set outside Washington: crude is $101.19 and headline inflation is 3.4%. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline is shut, a tanker on the Gulf-to-China run was hired at $1.035 million a day, and American retail diesel set a record at $6.29 a gallon. A quarter point on the funds rate reaches none of that. The Federal Reserve does not move tankers, does not move oil, does not run refineries. It moves money overnight. Moving money overnight does not solve any of the problems at hand.

Headline global liquidity, collateral values, bond volatility, and the dollar peaked higher without a dollar being printed this week. A quiet bond market allows for the same collateral to support more borrowing, jacking up a headline number arithmetically, while global liquidity itself fell for a second consecutive week.

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Macro Tape: A Unanimous Hike Into a Supply Shock

The Fed raised a quarter point to 3.75%–4.00% on September 16, its first increase since July 2023. The market had the move priced in. Producer prices rose 5.4% on the year against a 5.1% forecast and core consumer inflation rose 0.3% on the month against 0.2% expected – proof for every board member that a hike was needed. What president Trump won in return, is someone else to blame for his policy missteps.

The question is what the Fed interest rate actually reaches. The barrel is priced by bombed infrastructure and expensive underwriting of passage through a war zone. The Fed can not produce, transport, or refine oil.

Long money is priced by the bond market; and the ten-year hit 5.04% before the Fed even sat down to cast a vote. The Fed’s overnight rate is not an input that keeps economists up at night these days. The bond market is the captain now.

Goldman expects the Fed to hike again in October. It would land with the war’s inflation bill still unpaid: a congressional scorekeeper puts the Iran conflict at $38 billion and half a percentage point of inflation in early 2027. So far, the Fed only rose interest rates by half of that. To be continued…

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

Liquidity Tape: The Headline Number Turned Up on Arithmetic, Liquidity Kept Falling

Headline global liquidity set another record this week, but growth has been slowing noticeably since summer. The record headline number is coming from cheap collateral, enabled by an artificially quiet bond market.

More dollars get borrowed against the same collateral, and that multiplier is where all the growth in this summer’s liquidity data comes from. No new money entered the economy, liquidity creation stalled in February and has not restarted.

After the Fed raised the overnight interest rate, the dollar took back its 20-week moving average, which removes one of the pillars these arithmetically fabricated record liquidity numbers are standing on. What is left is bond calm, and we are entertaining the possibility that the calm has a deadline. It may very well be the precursor of a bigger storm.

The slowing liquidity cycle adds pressure to risk assets through the fourth quarter of 2026. We do not expect a liquidity floor from Fed or Treasury to be poured before spring 2027.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow)

Geopolitical Tape: The Strait’s Broken Bypass

Saudi Arabia built the East-West pipeline so that its crude would never have to pass Hormuz. That line has been shut with heavy damage. The repair is quoted at about a month.

So the Saudi kingdom’s barrels went back into the strait. Riyadh spent six months keeping its cargoes out of that water. It is the only route left. That hands the pricing of Saudi crude to the people underwriting insurance for these voyages. Tankers on the benchmark Gulf-to-China route were hired this week at $1.035 million a day.

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Commodity Tape: The Oil Shortage ends up in the Headline Print the Fed Votes on

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) sits at $101.19, which is 38.9% above its 100-week average of $72.83, and that average has itself climbed 1.96% over thirteen weeks. Brent held above $107 for most of this week, and WTI closed at $102.45, its 10th consecutive weekly close above the average.

The shortage has moved down the chain, ending up in the headline print the Fed just voted on. American retail diesel set a record at $6.29 a gallon on September 17, on a morning crude actually fell. This is a shortage in refining capacity. No pipeline repair builds a refinery.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

Hard Assets: Gold Competes with Attractive Yields

Gold was flat this week, and the ratio over oil compressed anyway: 42.95 barrels an ounce: crude’s completed weekly close rose 11.2% while gold’s fell 1.2%. The ratio is still more than twice its long-run mean, and has a long way to travel. Bitcoin over gold reads 17.58×, short of the 20× we treat as an early-bull signal.

The People’s Bank of China stays on the support side of gold, but its liquidity injections are decelerating. Michael Howell’s Capital Wars puts Chinese liquidity growth at modestly positive, which is still enough to keep pouring a $4000 floor under gold. But the line any gold bug should really watch is the one of real yields: The ten-year comes in at an attractive 2.60%. It’s the dollar competing with gold.

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Equity Tape: The AI Build-out and Who is Lending to It

The S&P 500 closed at 7,638 on September 17, up 1.1% on the day the Fed moved. The shape underneath equities, however, changed this week. Weakness reached the 50-day line with the 20-day line falling.

The bear case on the artificial-intelligence trade has always been that demand would disappoint. This week’s objection came from the supply side, when the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI called for a slowdown in frontier development.

We read that call as a negotiating position. Two companies whose largest input cost is silicon have threatened the industry to buy less of it.

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

On our use of AI:

We’re a private crypto fund out of Switzerland. We built a Neurosymbolic Compound AI System for our own desk: it follows our strategies, it reads the news that affect our portfolio, it sits on a database going back decades, and brings math to our everyday emotions. We call it Hayloo. It’s our best hire. This Substack is compiled by Hayloo and written by us.

Humans have written machine-assisted for centuries. What never changes is who decides.

Nothing at Hayloo INC. was ever decided by a machine.

What we publish is what we defend as a team. When it’s wrong, it’s wrong because humans signed it.

Jordi Federer, Founder, Hayloo INC.

hayloo.org

Disclaimer

The information is provided for information purposes only and on the basis that it will not be relied upon. No information contained herein constitutes a personal recommendation or investment advice.

The information (including any expressions of opinion or forecast) has been obtained from, or is based on, sources believed by the author to be reliable, but are not guaranteed as to their accuracy or completeness and should not be relied upon. The information is provided without obligation on the part of the author and on the understanding that any person who acts upon it or changes his investment position in reliance on it does so entirely at his own risk. The information does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Information is current only as at the date it is first posted and may no longer be true or complete when viewed by you. All information may be changed or amended without prior notice.

No representation, warranty or undertaking is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information by the author and no liability is accepted by the author for the accuracy or completeness of such information. In no event will the author be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of any use of the information, including, without limitation, any lost profits.

You should be aware that the Internet is not a completely reliable transmission medium. The author does not accept any liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the product or services referred to herein.

The materials provided here including text, photographs and other images, are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property rights. All copyright (and any other intellectual property rights) in these materials is either owned by the author, or is used by the author under license.

Bitcoin closed a week above $80,000 for the first time since May, and we were closely observing sustained spot demand. Demand did not come. Coinbase’s cumulative spot flow fell by $245.4 million and Binance’s fell by $387.2 million. The US bid from earlier in the week, likely into Clarity hopium or Warsh-dove rumors, has gone. This is not how sustained spot demand looks.

The Shadow Monetary Base, central-bank liquidity plus the collateral the system borrows against, measured by Michael Howell’s Capital Wars, printed both its legs under zero for the first time since mid-August: the three-month rate at −0.3% against −1.1%, the annual rate at −0.1% against +0.2%, and liquidity slipping to $109.4 trillion from a revised $109.5 trillion.

Overhead, the bitcoin sell-wall held. Three sources that do not share a method draw it in the same place, between $83,000 and $86,000: roughly 1.07 million coins of long-term-holder cost basis with the heaviest bucket near $85,000, a shelf of short liquidation levels that grew 21% since the August 19 squeeze while the whole liquidation map shrank by a third, and a spot fund complex that breaks even near $86,000 after 228 consecutive sessions below it. Spot printed a higher high than August on September 3 and stopped 1.5% short of the bottom of the band.

Then there is the absence, and it argues against our short position. Nobody is selling into that range high. Sell-side risk has fallen to 7 basis points a day against 16 at the August peak, and against 35 and 23 at the July and October 2025 highs. Long-term holders’ share of realized profit fell to 47% from 88%. The sellers up here are recent buyers, and even they are selling less.

The rest of the week came from the barrel and the long end. Brent reached $105.26 and American crude went through $100 for the first time since May, with the Houthis holding a Red Sea port 75 kilometres from Bab al-Mandeb and Saudi output at a 1990 low, while a Treasury buyback triple the size of the original intent failed to hold a ten-year that reached its highest since October 2023.

Hayloo’s crypto book did not trade. We remain short bitcoin and solana for a third week, with leveraged longs paying us 23.31% of equity annualized to sit still.

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Liquidity Tape

The liquidity engine put both of its legs under zero. The Shadow Monetary Base, central-bank money plus the collateral the system borrows against, printed a three-month rate of −0.3% against −1.1% and an annual rate of −0.1% against +0.2%. Its level came in at $109.4 trillion from a revised $109.5 trillion, against a February peak above $112 trillion. The three-month rate improved by eight tenths of a point this week and is still under water. The annual rate crossed back below zero. All these numbers come from Michael Howell’s Global Liquidity Index (GLI).

Headline global liquidity set a record in the same week at $195.4 trillion, with three-month momentum picking up to 2.3% from 1.8%. The two halves of one measurement now point in opposite directions, and the man who built it says why in his own words: the benign funding background is volatility suppression, not liquidity creation.

The lever under that suppression is bond volatility. Our book reads it live at 76.14 against a 200-week line of 97.86, with 23 consecutive completed weekly closes under that line since April 5. The collateral multiplier did the work again at 1.78 from 1.77, which is what a quiet bond market pays you: smaller haircuts, more borrowing on the same collateral, and a headline that reads full while no new money gets made.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow)

Macro Tape

The Treasury tripled the size of the operation and the long end went up anyway. A $6 billion buyback, against $2 billion originally, and the ten-year reached 4.856% on September 9, its highest print since October 2023. The thirty-year closed at 5.28% on September 9 against a completed weekly close of 5.24% from 5.22%. Scott Bessent said the expansion was aimed at cooling a fever in the bond market. We would label it a more severe disease than a bit of temperature.

The inflation print underneath it split in the worst direction for a Federal Reserve board that meets on September 16. Producer prices rose 0.4% on the month and 5.4% on the year, the core soft and the headline hot, and the gap between them is the fuel bill. Energy is not supposed to be the deciding variable at a meeting about services inflation, and this week it is. Hike odds sat at 58% to 60% early in the week, we’d put them higher.

The labour print did the same thing from the other side. Employers added 162,000 jobs against a 56,000 forecast and July was revised to a gain, so the number that was supposed to hand the doves their case handed the hawks a freebie instead.

Everyone else is tightening into the same barrel. The European Central Bank raised its deposit rate a quarter point to 2.5% with Christine Lagarde flagging inflation risks, the German ten-year printed a seventeen-year high inside a European selloff, and sources put the Bank of Japan at a quarter-point rise to 1.25% at the meeting ending September 18, with the yen already “out of control” (?).

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

Geopolitical Tape

The Houthis took the Red Sea port of Mocha and now sit about 75 kilometres from Bab al-Mandeb, the strait at the bottom of the Arabian peninsula. The Houthis do not need to close Bab al-Mandeb to charge for passage through it. For six months this war has been an argument about the strait at the top of the same peninsula, Hormuz, and now there are two of them. Ask the war-risk underwriters on Monday what a Red Sea voyage costs.

Washington changed method. For six months its answer to Iranian oil was to stop anyone from buying the cargo. On September 9 American forces destroyed five Iranian tankers, which takes those barrels off the water permanently instead of parking them, and those barrels are the one asset still funding Tehran.

Half a world away, Ukrainian drones hit Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, killing four, nine days after burning Ust-Luga on the Baltic. Novorossiysk and Ust-Luga are Moscow’s two seaborne exits for crude and for grain, and there is no third coast to move either cargo to.

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Commodity Tape

Brent went to $105.26 and American crude passed $100 for the first time since May. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) sits at $103.81, 43.14% above its 100-week average line at $72.52, and the line itself has climbed 1.51% over thirteen weeks. Nine consecutive completed weekly closes now sit above it; the last bar under the line was July 3, at 2.33% below.

The pump ran ahead of the barrel again. American retail diesel set an all-time record at $5.85 a gallon on September 4. A haulier paying a record for fuel on September 4, while crude still sat below its July high, was being taxed by distillation capacity rather than by geopolitics, and no ceasefire fixes a refinery.

The supply side is being destroyed while the demand side firms into it. Saudi output fell to a 1990 low and Aramco halted operations at several southern energy facilities after attacks, with nobody saying how long they stay down. Chinese refiners are back looking for barrels at the same time American aircraft are sinking the tankers that carry them, and the hulls do not come back.

The cleanest measure of the strait anyone has published in a month came from a government’s accounts rather than a freight rate: Qatar posted its widest quarterly deficit in almost a decade because the closure shut its gas trade. Crude has found its way out of that water at a price; the liquefied cargoes have not.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

Hard Assets

Copper set an all-time London Metal Exchange high twice this week and a broad metals gauge printed a record with it, and the refined-copper tariff that is supposed to justify the move has still not been announced. A metal that sets an all-time high on an anticipated policy already contains the decision in its price, which turns the decision itself into a downside event.

Gold’s floor is still poured in Beijing. The metal reads $4,364.50, 0.49% above its own 20-week line, on a completed weekly close of $4,428.35. China’s central bank added the most gold to its reserves since 2023 in August, in the same week Beijing pushed 360 billion yuan into eight state-owned banks and insurers.

The ratios say what the vehicle question has been saying for two months. Gold over oil compressed to 42.04 barrels an ounce from 49.45, most of it from the oil side again, though gold gave back 2.7% since Tuesday as well. Bitcoin over gold rose to 17.55× from 17.23×, still under the 20× early-bull band this desk measures.

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Equity Tape

The S&P 500 sits at 7,636.36, 0.83% under its 20-day average line at 7,700.13, after closing beneath it on September 8 and 9.

Occupancy reads 38.10% below the 20-day line and zero below the 50-, 100-, and 200-day. What did change is the shape: the 20-day line has turned down, the other three still rise, and all four trajectories are negative, at −12.77, −9.03, −14.58, and −8.40 index points. Last week the lines were rising with falling slopes. This week the nearest one started falling. A car-crash in the making?

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

Our Short-Kill Condition Came in Half-Baked

Bitcoin closed a week above $80,000 for the first time since May, but Coinbase and Binance sold into it.

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On-Chain Tape

The big fat bitcoin sell-wall between $83,000 and $86,000 we pointed at for months is drawn in the same place by three sources that do not talk to each other, and that is the finding of the week.

1. Roughly 1.07 million coins were acquired in that band, almost all of them by long-term holders, with the heaviest bucket near $85,000, and that block has barely moved in thirty days.

2. On the futures liquidation map, the shelf of short liquidation levels between $82,000 and $86,000 has grown 21% since the August 19 squeeze while the map as a whole shrank by a third, which puts it close to the largest share of modelled liquidation mass it has ever carried.

3. The American spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) complex, measured on the coins it has created since launch, breaks even in that zone: it has now closed below breakeven for 228 consecutive sessions, with its paper loss narrowing from about $18 billion in February to about $3.9 billion. Corporate treasuries break even near $80,500, and the average dollar deposited into the spot funds carries a cost basis of $81,776, so a bitcoin rally has several walls to clear before it even reaches the one that matters.

Spot printed a higher high than August on September 3, and stopped 1.5% below the bottom of the band. Underneath it the floor moved. Supply acquired between $76,000 and $82,000, mostly by recent buyers, has grown, while the accumulation floor between $62,000 and $65,000 thinned as coins bought there rotated out. The long-liquidation cluster between $60,000 and $63,000 is intact. The market rebuilt its floor directly beneath the price and left the wall where it was.

The part that argues against our short thesis is an absence rather than a number. Sell-side risk, which reads realized profit and loss against realized cap, has fallen to 7 basis points a day on a seven-day basis, less than half the 16 printed at the August peak and well under the 35 and 23 at the July and October 2025 highs.

Long-term holders’ share of realized profit fell to 47% from 88%, and September’s realized-profit spike came in under half of August’s. The sellers up here are recent buyers, and even they have slowed down.

— Capital Flow Analyst (Priya Sandoval) · Fundamental Research Analyst (Charlotte Donovan)

Hayloo’s Perp Book

Size and direction. Net short bitcoin and solana, unchanged in size and entry for a third week, and nothing traded. Bitcoin: 465 coins short from $78,749, both long legs closed since August. Solana: 496,100 coins short from a blended $93.42. At the mark that is $35.6 million of Bitcoin and $48.9 million of Solana.

Funding Rate Carry. The four-week smoothed mean reads $8,328 a day across sixteen populated sessions, which annualizes to $3.04 million and 23.31% of equity, the best rate of this cycle.

Position versus thesis. One of the three conditions that kills this trade printed half of itself, and that is the honest headline on our own perp book. Against it, the engine put both legs under zero, the wall held with spot a point and a half short, the barrel went through $100 while the long end refused a tripled bid, and Solana is now catching 86 cents of every dollar Bitcoin gains while handing back 111 of every dollar it loses (see Hayloo’s Altcoin Tax – Week 37).

What we are watching is the absence: nobody is selling into the range high, and that is the part of this tape that does not fit our position. Our size is unchanged and our conviction is lower than it was seven days ago.

On the spot side we sold 35,000 Solana and 8 million XRP on September 7.

— Lead Trader (Jordi Federer)

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Forward Thesis

Our direction reads lower to range-bound over the next four to twelve weeks with the balance of risk still down. What justifies full size is not the global liquidity engine topping. It is the regime it is topping inside. A liquidity top in disinflation is a pause the market can buy, and this one arrives with producer prices at 5.4% on the year, the thirty-year back at 5.24%, and a buyback that could not hold the long end.

The cost of carrying government debt is rising while the money to service it has stopped growing, so the policy response the market wants is the one that cannot come. Two dated liquidity pressure windows remain, early November and early December, and the path down runs from the true market mean at $76,591, where spot sits tonight, to the realized price at $53,222, which is 30.5% below spot and the level this trade has always been built toward.

What changes our mind, each against its current value.

1. A second completed weekly close above $80,000 with both exchange venues’ (Coinbase & Binance) seven-day flow positive on the same window. The price limb printed on September 6. The demand limb now has both venues selling on the trailing week. One limb from firing, and the closest any of the five has come.

2. Michael Howell’s next GLI-print with the three-month rate clearly positive and free of a base effect, while the annual rate turns up with it. Now −0.3% from −1.1%, with the annual leg back under zero. The three-month improved and the annual crossed the wrong way, so the pair is no closer than it was.

3. The S&P 500 taking up residence below its 20-day line instead of dipping under it and stepping back. Occupancy reads 38.10% on that line and zero on the 50-, 100-, and 200-day, with every trajectory negative, so the index is leaning without having moved in.

4. A sustained close beyond $86,000 with sell-side risk still subdued, which would say the wall was absorbed rather than respected.

Watchlist

• Sunday’s Bitcoin weekly close against $80,000. The price limb is already met on the prior bar. A second close with Binance and Coinbase buying fires our warning flag.

• Both venues’ seven-day spot flow on the same window. Coinbase at minus $245.4 million and Binance at minus $387.2 million, both selling on the trailing week, and the number to watch is Binance.

• Bitcoin at $76,197. The first decision on the leg: harvest the short, add the long, or pass.

• The band from $83,000 to $86,000. A settled close beyond $86,000 with sell-side risk still subdued is absorption rather than respect.

• Solana at $104.53. Inside the escalation band and watched daily.

• The August inflation print on September 11, the Federal Reserve on September 16, and the Bank of Japan on September 18. Hike odds near 60% with a barrel above $100 in the print, and a quarter point to 1.25% is the reported plan in Tokyo.

• The September 25 quarterly expiry. The largest on the board, with open interest stacked above $80,000, which pins the tape under the wall for a fortnight.

• Howell’s next print. The three-month is eight tenths of a point from zero and the annual leg is a tenth under it. The highest-information number of the coming weeks.

• The thirty-year against 5.27%. A weekly close above it breaks the year’s ceiling, and the buyback has already failed once.

• The Clarity Act cloture vote on September 15. A pass is the strength we sell XRP into.

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The Team

Jordi Federer — Lead Trader. Owns the book and the publication. Sizing, staging, and every decision that moves capital.

Theodore Brennan — Chief Macro Strategist. Central-bank reaction functions, the dollar, and the rate path.

Julian Harlow — Global Liquidity Director. The liquidity engine, the collateral multiplier, and the transmission lag into price.

Margaux Lindqvist — Geopolitical Intelligence Officer. State behavior, escalation mechanics, and the tails that reprice commodities.

Marcus Vasquez — Hard Asset Strategist. Gold, the debasement basket, and the hard-money ratios.

Sienna Whitfield — Inflation & Real Asset Analyst. Energy, the inflation impulse, and the real-asset complex.

Priya Sandoval — Capital Flow Analyst. Fund flows, positioning, derivatives, and where the marginal dollar comes from.

Charlotte Donovan — Fundamental Research Analyst. On-chain cohorts, cost bases, and the structural read beneath the tape.

Lukas Marchetti — Technical Analyst. Market structure, moving-average regimes, and the levels that fire.

Disclaimer

The information is provided for information purposes only and on the basis that it will not be relied upon. No information contained herein constitutes a personal recommendation or investment advice.

The information (including any expressions of opinion or forecast) has been obtained from, or is based on, sources believed by the author to be reliable, but are not guaranteed as to their accuracy or completeness and should not be relied upon. The information is provided without obligation on the part of the author and on the understanding that any person who acts upon it or changes his investment position in reliance on it does so entirely at his own risk. The information does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Information is current only as at the date it is first posted and may no longer be true or complete when viewed by you. All information may be changed or amended without prior notice.

No representation, warranty or undertaking is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information by the author and no liability is accepted by the author for the accuracy or completeness of such information. In no event will the author be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of any use of the information, including, without limitation, any lost profits.

You should be aware that the Internet is not a completely reliable transmission medium. The author does not accept any liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the product or services referred to herein.

The materials provided here including text, photographs and other images, are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property rights. All copyright (and any other intellectual property rights) in these materials is either owned by the author, or is used by the author under licence.

Tape of the Week

Michael Howell’s liquidity engine printed a negative three-month rate for the first time since the late-May trough, −1.1% from +0.8%, and Bitcoin was rejected at its local cycle top in the same week. Those two facts are not a coincidence. The Shadow Monetary Base, central-bank liquidity plus the collateral the system borrows against, has stopped creating money while the Global Liquidity Index (GLI) headline sits flat at a record $194.9 trillion. A stalled level with its rate going negative is an engine running out of gas.

What kept the gauge reading full was a bond market held quiet by the Treasury buying its own long debt, and the quiet lasted eight sessions. Scott Bessent hopefully got some sleep during them. Then the thirty-year returned to 5.27%, the exact level it held the moment before the buyback was announced and the year’s ceiling on its third test. The ten-year went to 4.81%. The selloff went global: gilts at 5.29%, the highest since 2007; Bunds at a 2011 level; Japan’s ten-year through 3.000% for the first time since 1996. Kevin Warsh, Donald Trump’s pick at the Fed, told Jackson Hole that policy is not restrictive enough. Central banks in Asia and Europe are already signaling higher rates. All the while US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admits to actively controlling the interest rates of the country of Japan.

Nothing on the ground says they can do otherwise. No ship has been counted through Hormuz in six consecutive days, two seafarers are dead on a Saudi hull in water Washington says it controls, and no insurer writes the next passage. Crude fell three sessions anyway, and American diesel set a four-year high at $5.783 a gallon on distillate stocks that have never been this low for the season. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) sits 27.2% above its 100-week line with heating season weeks away. The shortage is in the refinery, no reopened strait fixes it, and every central bank pricing energy into its rate path is pricing this.

Bitcoin ran on the same borrowed calm and stopped where it always stops. The rally’s best daily close came in last night at $81,268, the exact level that makes the average ETF-dollar whole, and the supply met it there. The band between $83,000 and $86,000 is the big green sell wall this book has pointed at for months, more than a million long-term-holder coins that sat through the entire drawdown. It was never touched. The buyers were headline money: spot funds absorbed a peak $290 million a day, the average deposited dollar now sits at breakeven and see that, both Coinbase and Binance flipped to net sellers. Bitcoin profit ratio fell from 3.72 to 1.21 in three sessions, and now there are no buyers left.

Hayloo’s crypto book remains short, leveraged longs are paying us 18.3% of equity in annualized funding fees to sit still.

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Liquidity Tape

Capital Wars’ Global Liquidity Index sits at $194.9 trillion, same as last week, the largest pile of money ever assembled. It’s the only number on the board that did not move. Everything else repriced: bonds moved, oil up gold up and bitcoin up. Global liquidity sat still but underneath it every rate rolled over: three-month momentum slowed down to 1.8% from 2.7%, the annual rate to 5.8% from 6.2%.

The foundation this record liquidity is standing on is the Shadow Monetary Base, central-bank money plus the collateral the system borrows against, and its three-month rate crossed from +0.8% to −1.1%. The base is creating nothing under a headline that has stopped growing.

What props headline liquidity up is the same trick as last week: a bond market kept quiet so lenders take less collateral for the same loan and the same collateral carries more borrowing power. The Treasury bought that silence by paying for its own long debt, but this week the bill came due.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent thought this through and it looks like he underestimated the task. The ten-year is back at 4.81%. The buyback relief, and the rally it produced that this book refused to join, lasted eight trading sessions.

Meanwhile, the dry liquidity through Michael Howell’s Capital Wars called three months ago is here. The late-May liquidity trough hit markets in late August and delivered the first rejection. The deeper trough lands early November. This week’s −1.1% starts a third clock that lands early December, on top of the November one. Howell still has the cycle low in January 2027. We are waiting for him to push it out.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow)

Macro Tape

Bessent’s increased buying of his own debt bought eight trading sessions and, we hope, a few nights of sleep. The ten-year is back at 4.81%, near a three-year high. The thirty-year is back at 5.27%, the exact print it held the moment before the operation was announced. Nothing was repaid. Nothing was refinanced cheaper. The Treasury showed up with money, the long end took it, and eight sessions later asked for more.

We would not want the job. Whether Bessent flies to Tokyo or buys his own paper, every time he opens his wallet the free trial becomes a subscription, and it cannot be cancelled before his boss’s term runs out. The fiscal system sitting underneath the world’s strongest economy has become a clown-show, no wonder the Dutch asked for their gold back.

Bessent is not alone in his grief. Gilts in London 5.29%, the highest level since August 2007. German Bunds go for 3.39%, last seen in 2011. France is at 2008 levels. Japan’s ten-year through 3.000% for the first time since October 1996. This planet’s bond market has stopped telling sovereigns apart. It is grading the sum of everyone’s policy errors that lead to a barrel of oil nobody can sustain and shipping lanes nobody can afford.

Kevin Warsh, Donald Trump’s pick at the Fed, told Jackson Hole that inflation is not meaningfully slowing and that policy does not look restrictive enough. Sounds like a pretty clear forward-guidance to us. September hike odds went from 35% to 60% before he left the stage, so we’re not alone in the camp of those who believe that rates will go up globally.

The U.S. Treasury has admitted to pressuring Japan into rate hikes and an end to big stimulus. Bluntly: the Treasury intervened to keep Japan’s currency from blowing up. The intervention failed. But at the same time, Washington now virtually dictates Japan’s rate path.

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

Geopolitical Tape

No ship has been counted through the Strait of Hormuz in six consecutive days. That is the one fact that matters. The rest was announcements, threats and gunfire: after a month of sanctions Washington went back to shooting, and one of the things it shot was a goddamn wedding.

Two supertankers were hit leaving the strait. Saudi Arabia confirmed two seafarers dead on the Saudi-owned Sidr. A Saudi ship, a Filipino crew, hit in water Washington says it controls, water that’s arguably seeded with Iranian mines, no insurer will underwrite the next “safe” passage through Hormuz on those terms.

The president spent a day talking the campaign’s length down while his aides told Reuters the next escalation waits until after the 3 November midterms. Shorter clock, wider map, same afternoon. These days, nobody in Washington seems to know what the man beside him is thinking, let alone the pace of the rollercoaster they have all strapped into.

Half a world away a Ukrainian drone set Ust-Luga on fire, the Baltic terminal Moscow moved its oil exports to to get away from the Black Sea. The alternative route for Russian oil is now burning, and that cost lands on top of the Iran war.

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Commodity Tape

Crude fell three sessions this week. American diesel set a four-year high anyway, $5.783 a gallon, on distillate stocks that have never been this low for the season. WTI sits 27.2% above the 100-week average line, and the line itself has climbed 1.16% over thirteen weeks.

Last week this desk split. One side read the barrel loosening: Gulf neighbors filling the Iranian gap, a good chunk of pre-war export flow moving while Tehran was still drafting laws around the strait. The other side read the refinery, the distillate shortage rebuilding underneath. The week settled it the hard way. The barrel came back up, the product spread widened with it, and refineries are not ready for heating season in the northern hemisphere.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

Hard Assets

Gold’s concrete floor is poured in Beijing. China’s sovereign issuance ran at 65% of quota through August, a third of the year’s paper still to sell in four months, and the liquidity that rides with that paper issuance ends up in gold.

Hence, gold has grounds to stand on, while everything around it reprices. Oil ran, Bitcoin ran, and both ratios moved with them. Gold/Oil came in to 49.23×, which looks like progress, and BTC/Gold reads 17.97×, still under the 20× early-bull band this desk measures.

The move that matters came from Amsterdam. De Nederlandsche Bank confirmed it shifted 86 tonnes of gold out of New York and Ottawa to London, citing geopolitical unrest. Until this summer New York held the largest single share of Dutch gold. It now holds the smallest. A central bank does not move seven tonnes a month across an ocean for convenience. Where do you stash your wealth?

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Equity Tape

The S&P sits 0.55% under its 20-day average line after four sessions running closed beneath it, Wednesday’s half-percent bounce included. The 20-week line is still 2.26% below price, and nothing structural has broken. However, all four horizon slopes turned negative inside one week: that is what a market looks like before it breaks.

The fast money did not wait to find out. Goldman’s prime desk has hedge-fund net leverage at 47.6%, the first percentile on a year; the nimblest book in the market went defensive before the counter started, not in response to it. JPMorgan put a 5% to 8% correction on the table before the midterms and blamed rising yields.

Under the index the AI trade is being marked. Broadcom is $520 billion off its June high. Nvidia raised $3.5 billion in convertibles through MediaTek. Roughly a trillion dollars of investment-grade paper trades wide for its own rating, which is where compute financed as infrastructure debt shows up first, while the index-level spread looks serene.

The link to our crypto book is a rule, not a view. Bitcoin’s thirty-session correlation with the S&P fell toward zero through this squeeze; Glassnode calls that transient, local exhaustion during sovereign selloffs rather than regime change. The institutional book that holds Bitcoin against a fixed allocation band sells it when equities shrink, and nobody at those desks decides anything. The mechanism is not firing today. It is one drawdown from arming, and JPMorgan and Goldman look positioned for exactly that drawdown in the fourth quarter.

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

Bitcoin Stopped Short of the Wall We Sold

The rally's best close landed on the $81,796 deposit-weighted ETF cost basis, and both Coinbase and Binance sold into the strength.

On-Chain Tape

Even after yesterday’s +5.2% close, this Bitcoin rally has yet to touch the wall: more than a million coins sitting green between $83,000 and $86,000, the cluster this book has named for months. The other boundary sits between $62,000 and $65,000, where short-term holders defend the entries they bought this summer. Bitcoin walked into this range in January, and nothing about either zone is new or exciting. The only thing worth mentioning is: We’re at the upper band of the range.

What is new is the profit overhang, and it explains why $80,000 failed on a weekly close so far. When Bitcoin traded near $78,000 in May, about 65% of supply was in profit. When it came back to the same price in late August, 68% was. Summer accumulation reset the short-term-holder cost basis, so the identical number on the screen now wakes a bigger pool of profitable coins, and every one of them is a seller with a reason. The same $80,000 level costs more to get through now than it did on the first attempt four months ago.

Who bought the rally matters more than how far it went. Spot funds absorbed a peak $290 million a day through the move while secondary turnover sat near $3 billion a day, well under earlier expansions: a lot of buying and very little trading. The deposit-weighted cost basis of every dollar in those funds sits at $81,796, so in addition to a sell-wall waiting at $83,000, Bitcoin must first clear an exchange-traded fund (ETF) wall sitting above spot.

This week, the seven-day volume delta went negative on both Coinbase and Binance, and the options crowd went home. Short-dated skew swung to −1.84 on August 30 and is back at +4.51, a full round trip, while 180-day skew never moved: long-dated optionality intact, short-dated enthusiasm gone.

The number that moved most this week moved against the bull case. The profit ratio reads 1.21, after 2.21 on the 31st and 3.72 on the 30th, against a thirty-day mean of 1.78. Seven prints above 2.0, and then the collapse. That is holders taking profit at a level that says distribution, not accumulating at a floor. Price sits above max pain, between two boundaries it has tested neither of, and the people who can are selling.

— Capital Flow Analyst (Priya Sandoval) · Fundamental Research Analyst (Charlotte Donovan)

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Hayloo’s Perp Book

Size and direction. Net short both legs, unchanged in size and entry for a second week. Bitcoin: 465 coins short from $78,749, long leg closed since August 24. Solana: 496,100 coins short from a blended $93.42.

Funding Rate Carry. The four-week smoothed mean reads $7,035 a day over sixteen populated sessions, which annualizes to $2.57 million and 18.3% of equity. Today’s print is $9,084. Leveraged longs are still paying us the best rate of this cycle to hold still.

Position versus thesis. The thesis is intact and it did not need defending this week; it needed nothing but the calendar. The engine printed negative on the leg that matters, the rally keeps meeting overhead supply, both spot venues turned sellers, the fund window flipped, and the long end took the Treasury’s relief back. Two of the three conditions that kept us up last week are putting us to sleep seven days later. We have said for a month that our money was on the wall rather than on Bitcoin. The wall never had to even take a punch. We remain short Crypto.

— Lead Trader (Jordi Federer)

Forward Thesis

Our direction is unchanged over the next four to twelve weeks and the ground under it is firmer than it was seven days ago. There are now three dated liquidity pressure windows stacked up: now, early November, and early December from this week’s −1.1% print. Bitcoin’s Realized Price sits at $53,112 and is the deep floor this trade has always been built toward.

What changes our mind, each against its current value.

1. Michael Howell’s next GLI weekly prints the three-month clearly positive without a base effect, with the level rising alongside it. Now −1.1% from +0.8%, and the annual leg at +0.2% is a rounding error that counts for nothing. This one moved further away than at any point in the window.

2. A completed weekly close above $80,000 with both spot venues’ seven-day volume delta positive on the same window. Both limbs read unmet: the completed close printed $77,659, and both Coinbase and Binance turned negative.

3. The profit ratio sustained above 2.0 with confirmed accumulation. Now 1.21 with a thirty-day mean of 1.78, after seven prints above the line.

Watchlist

• Bitcoin at $76,406, 6.0% below spot. The True Market Mean. A close back through it restores the bear regime read.

• Sunday’s weekly close against $80,000 with the venue bid. Both limbs are unmet today: spot is 1.6% above the line tonight, and the close that counts is Sunday’s.

• The profit ratio at 1.21. Read on its thirty-day mean at 1.78. Three-fold swings inside a week make the single print useless.

• The thirty-year against 5.27%. The year’s ceiling, tested a third time. Above it breaks the year, and the Treasury has already shown what its bid is worth – too little too late.

• The Bank of Japan on September 18. A rise with the dollar 0.76% under its 20-week line is the carry-stress path, and it removes one of the four supports holding record liquidity up.

• Capital Wars’ next weekly read. The three-month against zero on a basis with no base effect in it. The single highest-information number of the next month.

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The Team

Jordi Federer — Lead Trader. Owns the book and the publication. Sizing, staging, and every decision that moves capital.

Theodore Brennan — Chief Macro Strategist. Central-bank reaction functions, the dollar, and the rate path.

Julian Harlow — Global Liquidity Director. The liquidity engine, the collateral multiplier, and the transmission lag into price.

Margaux Lindqvist — Geopolitical Intelligence Officer. State behavior, escalation mechanics, and the tails that reprice commodities.

Marcus Vasquez — Hard Asset Strategist. Gold, the debasement basket, and the hard-money ratios.

Sienna Whitfield — Inflation & Real Asset Analyst. Energy, the inflation impulse, and the real-asset complex.

Priya Sandoval — Capital Flow Analyst. Fund flows, positioning, derivatives, and where the marginal dollar comes from.

Charlotte Donovan — Fundamental Research Analyst. On-chain cohorts, cost bases, and the structural read beneath the tape.

Lukas Marchetti — Technical Analyst. Market structure, moving-average regimes, and the levels that fire.

Disclaimer

The information is provided for information purposes only and on the basis that it will not be relied upon. No information contained herein constitutes a personal recommendation or investment advice.

The information (including any expressions of opinion or forecast) has been obtained from, or is based on, sources believed by the author to be reliable, but are not guaranteed as to their accuracy or completeness and should not be relied upon. The information is provided without obligation on the part of the author and on the understanding that any person who acts upon it or changes his investment position in reliance on it does so entirely at his own risk. The information does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Information is current only as at the date it is first posted and may no longer be true or complete when viewed by you. All information may be changed or amended without prior notice.

No representation, warranty or undertaking is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information by the author and no liability is accepted by the author for the accuracy or completeness of such information. In no event will the author be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of any use of the information, including, without limitation, any lost profits.

You should be aware that the Internet is not a completely reliable transmission medium. The author does not accept any liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the product or services referred to herein.

The materials provided here including text, photographs and other images, are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property rights. All copyright (and any other intellectual property rights) in these materials is either owned by the author, or is used by the author under licence.

Tape of the Week

Global liquidity, according to Michael Howell’s GLI, hit $194.9 trillion this week, the largest pile of money ever assembled, and nobody created any of it. The engine underneath it grew at −0.1% over twelve months. What lifted the headline was a bond market so quiet that lenders now accept less collateral against the same loan, which lets every dollar already in the system be borrowed against harder. That ratio is the collateral multiplier, it sits at 1.78, and it is the closest thing this week had to a printing press.

The bond market was quiet because it was bought. On August 19 the Treasury doubled its buyback cap to $4 billion and aimed the money at the long end. Then Stanley Druckenmiller, who taught Scott Bessent how to trade, took the argument to the Wall Street Journal and named the operation for what it is. A government managing the price of its own debt, and filing it as liquidity work.

Bitcoin ran on the same kind of fuel. The move began on August 19 with the biggest dollar day of short liquidations since 2019, which is a rally made of sellers rather than buyers. Real money did follow, $2.23 billion of it across seven sessions, and all six Bitcoin wallet cohorts have been accumulating for twenty days. Underneath that, long-term holders posted the largest realized loss of the run. The oldest money on the chain used the strength to leave.

So the week handed us a record, a rally, and a re-rating, and not one of the three was paid for with new money. The one figure nobody engineered sits 5% overhead of current spot Bitcoin: 1.05 million coins bought between $83,000 and $86,000 that have not moved through the entire drawdown. Bitcoin came into this range in January, failed at the top of it in May, and is back at that top now with nothing underneath it changed. We doubled the short into that local top and took both hedges off.

Liquidity Tape

Global liquidity is at an all-time high and the creation rate is zero. That is this week’s read.

Michael Howell’s Global Liquidity Index flashed $194.9 trillion, the largest pile of money the world has ever assembled. Near-term momentum slipped to 2.7% annualized. The annual rate stabilized at 6.2%, which sounds respectable until you remember that stabilized is what a number does when it has stopped going anywhere, while rates and inflation move.

The Shadow Monetary Base is central bank liquidity plus the collateral the system borrows against, the foundation the whole $194.9 trillion stands on. It printed $109.7 trillion, a hair above last week’s revised $109.6 trillion. Its three-month rate remained at 0.8%, and the annual rate is −0.1%, which confirms that the underlying liquidity creation has stalled. Twelve months of work by the five largest central banks on earth, and the foundation is fractionally smaller than when they started.

Follow the money, and you will find that bond volatility is low, very low. This means lenders demand less collateral against the same loan. Smaller haircuts mean every dollar of collateral carries more borrowing on its back. That ratio is the collateral multiplier and it sits at 1.78. So a slice of the money holding that record headline liquidity up was never created by anybody. It was manufactured by a quiet bond market letting the same collateral be borrowed against harder, which is exactly what an annual rate of −0.1% says from the other side.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow)

Macro Tape

The Treasury has become the marginal buyer at the long end, and this week that worked.

The thirty-year came in to 5.17% on the weekly close from 5.27%. That 5.27% is the high of the past year, and the market has now put its shoulder to it twice without getting through. What moved it back was not a change of heart about American debt. On August 19 the Treasury doubled the cap on its buyback operations, from $2 billion to $4 billion, and pointed the money at the long end.

Then on the 25th, Stanley Druckenmiller, who taught Scott Bessent how to trade, took the argument to the Wall Street Journal editorial page under the title “Let the Bond Market Speak.” His charge is not that the buying fails. It is that the buying is a fraud on the tape. The Treasury is managing the price of its own debt and filing it as liquidity work, and in doing so it is jamming the most important price signal in global finance. Drop the buybacks, Druckenmiller says, and shrink the primary deficit, because that is the only repair that holds. A thirty-year clearing at 5.5% is not an insult Bessent can talk down. It is an invoice, for a subscription, and just like your Netflix bill, it keeps coming back.

The July inflation print gave everyone room to argue. Core PCE rose 0.2% on the month and 3.3% on the year. Headline came in at 3.7% against a 3.6% forecast. Real spending was flat.

The Bank of Japan’s Ryozo Himino backed continued rate rises with the policy rate already at a thirty-one-year high, and in the same week the Finance Ministry said it will seek a record ¥36.6 trillion to service the debt. The rate rise that steadies the yen impacts the budget. Tokyo can’t have both at once. In Frankfurt, Isabel Schnabel said rates must rise further and tied the euro-area path explicitly to energy prices, which quietly makes the Strait of Hormuz a European Central Bank (ECB) variable.

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

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Geopolitical Tape

Kpler counted 236 crossings of Hormuz in the first nineteen days of August. Before the war, that lane ran roughly 130 a day.

Washington made five Iranian sectors sanctionable and stopped short of the Chinese banks that clear the oil money. Tehran priced that inside the hour and so did crude.

Beijing has been told it is exposed and has answered that it is not moving, which leaves the next escalation resting on a question nobody wants to hear: do some folks in Washington actually want a war with China?

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Commodity Tape

Seven consecutive completed weekly WTI closes above the 100-week line, and the line itself is rising.

American diesel supplies are at the lowest seasonal level ever recorded, and Europe reached all the way to Mexico for cargoes for the first time in seven years. A cheaper barrel does not fix a shortage of refining capacity, and heating season starts shortly in the northern hemisphere.

Our desk splits on which half is the signal. We read the pillar reloading from the refinery. The geopolitical desk reads the barrel side genuinely loosening, with Gulf neighbors filling the gap and the war premium bleeding out on flows nobody had to negotiate. What settles it is a fortnight of transit counts, supplies at normal levels, and not another truth or dare.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

Hard Assets

Gold sits at $4,604, 4.90% above its 20-week line, enabled by renewed People’s Bank of China liquidity injections.

The Bank of Russia cut its gold holdings to a six-year low, selling the reserve asset into strength. That is not a new Russian view on gold, it is a funding decision: a country that needs cash borrows it. A country that desperately needs cash borrows it at any price. And a country that is isolated sells the reserve asset.

BTC/Gold rose to 17.16× from 16.18×, all of it from Bitcoin’s attempt at closing the week above, and standing on an $80,000 floor. It is still under the 20× early-bull band, but the gap narrowed. Gold/Oil widened to 56.26× from 51.81×, and that one is the barrel’s doing.

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Equity Tape

The S&P sits on its 20-day line at 7,730.84, closing on a cushion it held through the AI hype. The index is still above its 20-week line, and all four structural lines are still rising, but the slopes flattened across the week. Nothing has broken. But there is almost no daylight left between the index and the first line that will fire the flags at overleveraged positions.

Nvidia was this week’s story, reporting $96.2 billion against $92.27 billion and guiding to $108 billion against $103.9 billion, with margin guided down to 74%.

On the same morning, Australian businesses cut June-quarter investment, and data-center spending sat at the heart of the slowdown. Australia is far away for most people on the globe, and one country is not a trend.

But the signal we read is that while the supplier beat expectations, the buyer expresses caution. Weakness on the side writing the checks always travels to the side cashing them.

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

1 Million Coins Sit Between Bitcoin and a Breakout – Hayloo’s Crypto Board Week 35

Real money flowed into Bitcoin this week, and the move still stopped at the wall we pointed at for weeks.

On-Chain Tape

The buyer changed mid-move, and that is the part that matters.

The first half of Bitcoin’s miraculous rise from the ashes was shorts being run over into a squeeze. August 19 was the biggest dollar day of short liquidations since 2019.

The second half was real money flowing in: $2.23 billion of exchange-traded fund (ETF) inflows, the strongest seven-day intake of the year. Futures open interest fell 11% in coin terms over the same window and funding barely left neutral, so there was no crowded short base going in and no leveraged long chasing it out.

Glassnode’s accumulation measure has held for all six wallet cohorts across twenty days since August 5, the most persistent all-cohort buying since late 2024. The realized profit-loss ratio reads 3.115 and has printed above 2.0 on six consecutive days, five of them above 3.0, after a fortnight that sat under 1.0.

Long-term-holder realized loss on a thirty-day average made a run high at $355.8 million. Old money is still leaving into strength.

The wall above is the one we’ve pointed at for weeks: $83,000 to $86,000 is the level of 1.05 million coins that sat through the entire drawdown. Below, the $62,000 to $65,000 band holds 1.44 million coins, many of them short-term holders defending recent entries.

This on-chain read bids for patience. Bitcoin came into this range in January and has not closed above the top of it since. It tried in May and failed there. It is back at that same top now, and nothing underneath it has changed. We doubt that the current landscape warrants a breach to the upside.

— Capital Flow Analyst (Priya Sandoval) · Fundamental Research Analyst (Charlotte Donovan)

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Hayloo’s Perp Book

Size and direction. Net short Bitcoin and Solana, and no longer hedged on either. Bitcoin: 465 coins short at $78,749.00, long leg closed. Solana: 496,100 coins short at a blended $93.42, long leg closed. Net notional across the book is $82,963,947 short.

Solana ETFs rose to a record cumulative Total Net Inflow of $1.32B, front-running three validator proposals, two of them aimed squarely at the supply. All three passed, and the outcome was never in doubt. Rumor buyers now run into a wall of news sellers, and they are paying steep funding to stand there.

We closed the long hedge and rolled into the short leg, banking roughly $500,000, a 112% profit on a position held since June.

With the Solana vote behind us, Bitcoin sets the pace from here. And Bitcoin has gone nowhere for seven days. We’re short both legs.

Position versus thesis. The thesis is intact and the foundation under it got firmer. What changed is the exposure. We are at the top of a multi-month range, we doubt any liquidity will reach Bitcoin anytime soon, and we doubt that the equity tape supports it any further.

That last one is mechanical, and it is worth walking slowly. Equities are slowing down. The institutional book that holds Bitcoin against a fixed allocation band suddenly finds Bitcoin too large a share of a smaller portfolio. Nobody at those desks decides anything. The rule sells Bitcoin. And it sells into a band already holding 1.05 million coins of long-term-holder supply, with a short-liquidation shelf running all the way to $86,000.

We have been pointing at that wall for weeks. Here we are, and our money is on the wall, not on Bitcoin.

— Lead Trader (Jordi Federer)

Forward Thesis

Our direction is unchanged over the next four to twelve weeks and the foundation under it is stronger than it was seven days ago. Global Liquidity Index (GLI) weakness from the late-May trough lands in financial markets now, followed by an even deeper window in early November, and nothing points up yet.

Our short book filled up through a move where all six wallet cohorts have been accumulating for twenty days. We buy weakness and sell strength, so twenty days of everyone buying is our signal to be on the other side. That’s how we trade perps at Hayloo.

We’ve also cut our XRP spot exposure in half. We’re rebuilding the spot book for a market that adopts the technology fast and usually skips the coin that runs on it.

What would change our mind, each against its current value.

1. Liquidity inflows clearly positive without a base effect, with the annual leg back above zero. Now 0.8%, with the base effect named by Michael Howell of Capital Wars, and the annual leg at −0.1%. Further away than at any point in this window.

2. A Bitcoin close beyond $83,300 with inflows holding, which would absorb the wall rather than respect it.

3. The profit-loss ratio holding above 2.0 through a pullback, with cohort accumulation intact. Now 3.115, six prints deep. We flag this, and look at the pullback.

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The Team

Jordi Federer — Lead Trader. Owns the book and the publication. Sizing, staging, and every decision that moves capital.

Theodore Brennan — Chief Macro Strategist. Central-bank reaction functions, the dollar, and the rate path.

Julian Harlow — Global Liquidity Director. The liquidity engine, the collateral multiplier, and the transmission lag into price.

Margaux Lindqvist — Geopolitical Intelligence Officer. State behavior, escalation mechanics, and the tails that reprice commodities.

Marcus Vasquez — Hard Asset Strategist. Gold, the debasement basket, and the hard-money ratios.

Sienna Whitfield — Inflation & Real Asset Analyst. Energy, the inflation impulse, and the real-asset complex.

Priya Sandoval — Capital Flow Analyst. Fund flows, positioning, derivatives, and where the marginal dollar comes from.

Charlotte Donovan — Fundamental Research Analyst. On-chain cohorts, cost bases, and the structural read beneath the tape.

Lukas Marchetti — Technical Analyst. Market structure, moving-average regimes, and the levels that fire.

Disclaimer

The information is provided for information purposes only and on the basis that it will not be relied upon. No information contained herein constitutes a personal recommendation or investment advice.

The information (including any expressions of opinion or forecast) has been obtained from, or is based on, sources believed by the author to be reliable, but are not guaranteed as to their accuracy or completeness and should not be relied upon. The information is provided without obligation on the part of the author and on the understanding that any person who acts upon it or changes his investment position in reliance on it does so entirely at his own risk. The information does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Information is current only as at the date it is first posted and may no longer be true or complete when viewed by you. All information may be changed or amended without prior notice.

No representation, warranty or undertaking is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information by the author and no liability is accepted by the author for the accuracy or completeness of such information. In no event will the author be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of any use of the information, including, without limitation, any lost profits.

You should be aware that the Internet is not a completely reliable transmission medium. The author does not accept any liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the product or services referred to herein.

The materials provided here including text, photographs and other images, are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property rights. All copyright (and any other intellectual property rights) in these materials is either owned by the author, or is used by the author under licence.

Tape of the Week

The Federal Reserve still believes it decides what money costs in America. Meanwhile the bond market had already taken over the job. When a government owes $40 trillion and adds a record $432 billion of deficit in a single month, its lenders start naming the price, and this month they named 5.34% on the thirty-year, the steepest since 2007.

So the Treasury hastily doubled buying its own debt. A droplet of two billion per month on a 432 billion hot stone, a quarter of which interest only. Yet yields fell, assets ran, Bitcoin’s drowning buyers surfaced, and the whole world turned green off an operation that added not one new dollar to the system.

That’s the story of this week — a market celebrating its own life support. It’s like a smoking cancer patient. The cigar glims as long as Japan keeps lending, and nobody asks what the AI build costs at these yields.

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Liquidity Tape

No new money came in this week. The pile actually shrank — $110.1 trillion from $110.3 — even though the Global Liquidity Index (GLI) Shadow Monetary Base flipped positive for the first time in six weeks, +2.6% against −5.7%.

Washington keeps the long end sedated, or tries to, borrowing short-term into an economy growing at up to 8%. It comes at no surprise that the bond market is asking for their share.

Wednesday’s buyback was met with applause by mainstream economists, celebrating a Treasury that shows up when the bond market panics.

We say the secretary fixed a pipe in the Sahara desert — there’s nowhere near enough liquidity running through his plumbing to hold up a market priced this rich.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow)

Macro Tape

Reading July’s Fed minutes, you’d think they still set the price of money — a room full of people arguing about inflation, several of them wanting a rate hike. The decision isn’t theirs anymore. The 30-year went to 5.34%, the highest since 2007, the bond market is the central bank now, and it takes fewer questions than Fed chair Kevin Warsh.

Washington owes $40 trillion, penned a record $432 billion deficit in a single month with a quarter of that just interest, and the loan sharks are naturally asking for more.

So Scott Bessent went out and bought his own debt from two doors down, twice the amount. Yields came down, the dollar cracked, Bitcoin rallied, and not one dollar moved off America’s shoulders. A headfake.

The debt just got shorter, which means the shark comes knocking down Bessent’s door more often, with the mess left for whoever’s holding the job past the midterms. That ends the day the Bank of Japan moves. People inside the building are saying the day is close.

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

Geopolitical Tape

For sixty days, oil moved through the Strait of Hormuz — somewhat. What moved those ships was not some kind of war-power or ammunition. It was insurance. Underwriters would cover a tanker because there was a truce, and now there’s nothing.

Abu Dhabi cutting off all trade and money transfers with Iran is the thing that matters more than any headline-grabbing American threats this week.

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Commodity Tape

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) sits at $86.56 at the time of writing, comfortably more than 20% above its 100-week line — and the line itself is climbing. A good chunk of that cushion is the regime of fear, and fear is refundable: sign a deal and the price will show it. But only reliable infrastructure will Make America’s Energy Cheap Again. Brent sits at $91.93, priced as if Russian oil exports were flowing. They aren’t, and that’s not priced in.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

Hard Assets

Bitcoin outran gold this week while Fed liquidity was draining. That’s the tell. Bitcoin didn’t run on liquidity — there wasn’t any — it ran on a bond-market repair headfake and the market deciding that counted as fuel for a rally. BTC/Gold went to 16.18× from 14.67×, too early to repost these bookmarked Peter Schiff memes. Gold/Oil is sitting flat because gold ran with oil this week.

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Equity Tape

How do you keep an artificial-intelligence (AI) boom growing at the pace it’s priced when both money and energy are getting more expensive? Nobody’s answering that.

The S&P sits above every line and every line points up, but exposed multinationals like Samsung drop more than 7% in a day without a peep about their business. Markets aren’t trading assets anymore, they’re trading real yields, the price of money, and nothing else.

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

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This Bitcoin rally showed up empty handed

A seventh straight week of long-term holders realizing losses, this one into strength

On-Chain Tape

The average Bitcoin buyer of 2026 got made whole this week. Recent buyers went from 5.44% underwater to 2.92% in profit, and the rail at $71,882 — the level this book has named for a month as the thing that would prove it wrong — got wiped out. We’re standing on a floor we stared at as a ceiling for over a month.

So is Hayloo wrong? The 2026 crowd’s break-even now sits 7.11% below spot. Coinbase saw its heaviest net buying of the month on Wednesday, $88.8 million of real cash, and 5,823 coins came off exchanges the same day. Plenty of trading went through, but less than a dime of every dollar that changed hands in the funds was new money.

Long-term holders sold into every spike of the rally, a seventh straight week of realized losses at $327 million on the thirty-day average. The oldest Bitcoin money used the strength to leave the ship, which is one condition for a bear-market bottom to take shape. The other is enough buyers to scoop up the supply. Futures open interest crashed hard, dropping 34,315 coins, down 6.5%, while price ran. We hate to rain on anyone’s parade, but this rally showed up empty handed.

— Capital Flow Analyst (Priya Sandoval) · Fundamental Research Analyst (Charlotte Donovan)

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Hayloo’s Perp Book

Size and direction. Net short. Bitcoin: 233.900 coins long at $67,391.50 against 465.000 short at $68,749.00, for −231.100 net and an entry-net of −$16,205,413. Solana: 89,100 long at $86.82 against 125,100 short at $78.24, for −36,000 net and −$2,052,162 entry-net.

What the week cost. Our perp book gave back all unrealized hedging profit and is deeply green in spot. Thursday’s realized funding rate income was +$5,803.95, the four-week smoothed mean reads +$2,753.26 a day, which annualizes to +$1,004,939 and 15.70% of equity. Leveraged longs are paying us the best rate so far this cycle for the privilege of being on the right side of the longer trend all year.

Position versus thesis. The tape says the ceiling is a floor now and both recent-buyer rails are reclaimed. We see too many holders exiting into strength. No liquidity has been created and the driest months are still ahead of us. We hold our short position.

— Lead Trader (Jordi Federer)

Forward Thesis

Our case for holding on to our short positions is the profitability of weak hands, the lack of buyer conviction, the speculative liquidity cycle, and none of the three moved against us this week.

Our downside ladder needs an upgrade, but we won’t be shy adding to our short positions should 71K break on persisting on-chain weakness. With liquidity leaving financial markets, Bitcoin’s Realized Price at $52,685, sitting on top of the long-term-holder cost basis at $50,433, these are levels that are a hard sell after this week, but we’d consider them just as realistic as a break above 83K.

What would change our mind, each against its current value:

1. The next Michael Howell GLI print positive on the three-month rate with the nominal level rising alongside it. This week printed +2.6% with the level at $110.1 trillion, down from a revised $110.3 trillion.

2. A weekly close above $80,000 with volume joining the bid. Coinbase’s seven-day cumulative volume delta is positive; Binance’s is not.

3. Realized profit-loss sustained above 2.0 with confirmed accumulation. Now 1.11. It crossed 1.0 this week, halfway there.

Watchlist

Michael Howell’s next GLI print. Positive three-month with the level rising alters this trade. Positive three-month with the level falling again is a second base effect and changes nothing. The single highest-information number of the next month.

Bitcoin at $71,882 — the recent-buyer rail. Losing this level restores the capitulation read Hayloo’s trade runs on.

Bitcoin at $75,759 — the True Market Mean. The next wall, and the last one before we sleep with our eyes open...

Futures open interest at 494,739 coins. Falling through a rally is leverage leaving. If it turns up hard alongside price, the squeeze has become a position.

WTI’s weekly close, against a line near $71.92. Digital assets don’t recover easily on inflated energy.

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The Team

Jordi Federer — Lead Trader. Owns the book and the publication. Sizing, staging, and every decision that moves capital.

Theodore Brennan — Chief Macro Strategist. Central-bank reaction functions, the dollar, and the rate path.

Julian Harlow — Global Liquidity Director. The liquidity engine, the collateral multiplier, and the transmission lag into price.

Margaux Lindqvist — Geopolitical Intelligence Officer. State behavior, escalation mechanics, and the tails that reprice commodities.

Marcus Vasquez — Hard Asset Strategist. Gold, the debasement basket, and the hard-money ratios.

Sienna Whitfield — Inflation & Real Asset Analyst. Energy, the inflation impulse, and the real-asset complex.

Priya Sandoval — Capital Flow Analyst. Fund flows, positioning, derivatives, and where the marginal dollar comes from.

Charlotte Donovan — Fundamental Research Analyst. On-chain cohorts, cost bases, and the structural read beneath the tape.

Lukas Marchetti — Technical Analyst. Market structure, moving-average regimes, and the levels that fire.

Disclaimer

The information is provided for information purposes only and on the basis that it will not be relied upon. No information contained herein constitutes a personal recommendation or investment advice.

The information (including any expressions of opinion or forecast) has been obtained from, or is based on, sources believed by the author to be reliable, but are not guaranteed as to their accuracy or completeness and should not be relied upon. The information is provided without obligation on the part of the author and on the understanding that any person who acts upon it or changes his investment position in reliance on it does so entirely at his own risk. The information does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Information is current only as at the date it is first posted and may no longer be true or complete when viewed by you. All information may be changed or amended without prior notice.

No representation, warranty or undertaking is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information by the author and no liability is accepted by the author for the accuracy or completeness of such information. In no event will the author be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of any use of the information, including, without limitation, any lost profits.

You should be aware that the Internet is not a completely reliable transmission medium. The author does not accept any liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the product or services referred to herein.

The materials provided here including text, photographs and other images, are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property rights. All copyright (and any other intellectual property rights) in these materials is either owned by the author, or is used by the author under licence.

Tape of the Week

The S&P hit another record with consumer confidence near a decade low. Households trust that Elon Musk will hand them back their money a hundredfold, but they do not trust the currency of their own government. Underneath, the tape has gone quiet in a way that should not be mistaken for calm. Global liquidity is draining out of risk assets and into real stuff, and Bitcoin’s spot volume now reads like a minute of silence, everyone waiting for the first person to clap.

Bitcoin sellers are exhausted and half the supply is still in profit. Call that a recognisable bottoming zone. Those same readings were true in November 2018, three weeks before the market fell another fifty percent. The risk here is mechanical rather than emotional. The thing most likely to hit Bitcoin this quarter is not a Bitcoin event, and nobody who delivers it will have formed an opinion about Bitcoin. A spreadsheet will do the selling, into a bid a third thinner than the one that caught the last move.

Liquidity Tape

The money that funds markets shrank again, the fifth week running, and the fall got steeper. The Global Liquidity Index (GLI) Shadow Monetary Base is falling at a 5.7% annual pace over the last three months, from 5.4%.

With the Treasury arguably suppressing bond volatility on purpose, the collateral multiplier now prints 1.77. Quiet bonds mean smaller haircuts, so the same collateral carries more borrowing. Global liquidity is still growing on the back of that, at 3.9% over three months, inflation is running at 3.4%, so money is barely growing faster than prices.

In an ordinary economy that balance would be healthy. In markets leveraged to the teeth it is not enough to keep the music playing. Keep going down that alley and liquidity growth reaches zero in September. If the suppressed bond jitters unwind and the MOVE index of bond volatility climbs from the seventies back above eighty, the collateral multiplier runs backwards and takes a chunk of the world’s $194 trillion with it.

We have been short risk assets since January and here is why we hold a while longer. The Treasury is borrowing on very short terms, which keeps cash moving through the real economy, and the results show it: factory activity jumped to 55.6 from 53.3 and the Atlanta Fed sees 5.8% growth this quarter. The world’s biggest economy is running hot.

Meanwhile the Fed’s bond-buying programme, the thing that used to feed markets specifically, is down to about 40% of its peak. Overleveraged financial markets are at risk of reverting to their 200-week averages, as they did in 2022, when the S&P fell 25% and Bitcoin fell 75%.

Money has become tight, and prices built on promises of future growth get harder to justify. Investors have not accepted that yet. And that’s why we keep our short positions open a little longer.

Hard Assets

Gold had its strongest week since January, and how it traded matters more than where it closed. It was bid while oil fell. The engine underneath is why we take it seriously. Michael Howell’s Capitalwars tracks the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) balance sheet against gold and finds: the tap went off in early March alongside the Iran crisis and gold fell. Injections restarted around the fragile peace memorandum.

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Macro Tape

The data made the case for cutting rates twice in seven days, and the Fed spent the same week arguing back.

American employers cut 23,000 jobs in July against a forecast of 80,000 to 100,000 new ones, and the statistics bureau quietly removed another 103,000 from May and June. Then inflation came in at 3.4% from 3.5%, with the underlying rate easing to 2.5%. Traders read the pair and cut September hike odds to 35% from 57%.

Three Fed officials answered inside a single day and all three talked rates up, which sits oddly against a President demanding cuts while crafting inflation through oil wars, sanctions and tariffs. Those pull against each other.

Note what a rate above inflation actually does. Debt only melts when inflation runs hotter than the rate, and the inflation relief is thinner than it looks anyway. It covers July, before the strait tightened again, and the part that cooled was energy, the one line the ongoing war controls.

That’s why lenders charge America more, and they charge it in the long end where a weak jobs print cannot reach.

The bond market is the only participant of Trump’s presidency who cannot be fired or jawboned. The 30-year hit 5.23%, a nineteen-year high, and at that yield, buyers are showing up. It also melts every version of managing the American debt to pudding, which is why Japan’s ability to fund itself matters so much: As long as Japan does not need to sell American bonds, every asset on the board can breathe another day.

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

Commodity Tape

WTI sits 16.31% above its rising 100-week average, and the reopening trade that had been compressing that cushion collapsed because paying Tehran for passage breaches US sanctions and voids war cover under a Lloyd’s clause adopted on July 23. A headline can move the price of oil. Only an underwriter lets a ship sail. Transit ran six vessels on Monday and eight on Tuesday.

The supply picture underneath does not resolve when a strait opens. It resolves on two rebuilding timetables at once, the diplomatic one and the physical one, and the physical one is far slower. Every substitute for Hormuz is the long way round, through new pipelines and new tonnage. That is years of construction, not a news cycle.

A genuine truce could still take 20% off the price inside a week, and the structure underneath would not have moved an inch. The energy crisis ends when cheap energy flows again, not when Trump feints.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

Geopolitical Tape

Washington and Tehran now prefer arguing over money to spending it on ammunition. Trump wants compensation from Tehran and Tehran wants it from Washington. They will haggle over that for months, if not years.

Tokyo went around both of them and phoned Tehran directly to ask that its ships not be charged for passage. That call is the most informative thing in the week. Japan buys almost all its crude from the Gulf, nearly all of it through this strait, along with much of its gas, and it sits on one of the deepest emergency stockpiles in the world. So the buyer with the most at stake and the most time to spare has decided the mediators will not deliver, and has gone to negotiate its own exemption.

Which exposes America’s Achilles heel. The blockade binds people inside the dollar system and nobody else. China has been buying Iranian crude for years through small refiners paying in yuan, through banks with no American exposure, and nothing happening in the Gulf touches that trade. The oil moves. What is being decided is who gets to buy cheap energy.

That gives Japan’s call two possible follow-throughs. Either countries win carve-outs inside the existing system, or the Russian model spreads: non-Western insurers, non-Western banks, a separate fleet.

Safe passage gets rebuilt either way, because the people who need it to work will build it locally. A system built to route around a crisis outlives the crisis, and the customers it wins do not come back to the dollar once the shooting stops.

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Equity Tape

Nothing here is under stress at any horizon we measure. SPX sits above its 20-day and 20-week lines, all four trend lines rising, a fresh record on August 7.

What the tape carries is a rotation. Consumer confidence sits among the weakest readings of the past decade while the index prints records. Households are leaving cash for assets. They may trust Apple, or Elon Musk, or a fund that holds a little of everything. What they no longer trust is the currency their government is printing.

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Bitcoin sat out that flight entirely, which is awkward for an asset built to catch it. The S&P-to-Bitcoin ratio crossed above its 200-week average for the first time. The earnings themselves came in strong, near 33% growth and one of the largest beats on record. What has weakened is the market’s willingness to pay for them, with the forward multiple down about 15% since October even as the index made new highs. Investors are handing the artificial-intelligence (AI) trade record profits and marking down what those profits are worth, because they are questioning chip-demand forecasts and the debt being taken on to meet them.

Nvidia is arranging a $500 billion financing pool with Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, using their clients’ capital rather than its own balance sheet, to fund the customers who buy Nvidia chips. The stock fell on concerns about circular financing and how long the spending can last. Nvidia reports on August 26.

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

Looking for the Alts That Thrive Without Clarity – Crypto Tape Week 33

On-Chain Tape

Price is wedged in a vice and both jaws are closing. Spot sits just above the median cost basis at $63,000 and below recent-buyer break-even at $68,827. It has spent nearly three months in that pocket, and barely half the circulating supply holds an unrealized profit.

The danger sits underneath. Futures open interest runs at 1.36 times a full day of futures volume. When open interest towers over daily volume, liquidations meet almost nothing to absorb them.

That is the floor a genuine accident would land on, and the route it would take has nothing to do with Bitcoin. A crack in the AI trade hits a leveraged multi-strategy book, gross exposure has to come down by more than the loss to hold the leverage ratio, and every sleeve gets cut regardless of what it did.

Bitcoin is the only position in that book that trades at three in the morning on a Sunday, so it is what sells when margin is needed before Tokyo opens.

Nobody in that chain forms an opinion about Bitcoin. A spreadsheet sells it. Institutional size arriving into a book this thin is why $58,500 is one floor, realized price at $52,748 is another. Bitcoin is standing on a frozen lake right now, and if the floor gets hot, prices melt.

Sellers are exhausted and half the supply is still in profit. Call that a recognisable bottoming zone. Those readings were also true in November 2018, three weeks before the market fell another fifty percent.

Bitcoin at $63,000 looks like a fair price to pay. A twenty percent wick is the ordinary cost of being early in this asset class. Our buy orders sit below $60,000.

— Capital Flow Analyst (Priya Sandoval) · Fundamental Research Analyst (Charlotte Donovan)

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Hayloo’s Perp Book

Size and direction. Hayloo’s book remains net short. Bitcoin: −231.100 coins net, an entry-net of −$16,205,413 and −$14,717,835 at mark. Solana: −36,000 coins net, −$2,052,162 entry-net and −$2,746,080 at mark. Equity reads $8,799,397, down 0.13% on the week, having traded to $8,439,200 on August 10 and recovered from there.

What we are watching inside that. We moved a large part of our spot collateral into stablecoins in August 2025, and the changes coming out of the current US administration have us restructuring that collateral rather than simply redeploying it.

The coins that live with permanent ambiguity rather than waiting to be rescued from Washington pique our interest, and we are taking deep dives into ONDO, XAUT, HYPE and LINK. The book has run hedged since January, sitting 65/35 short. Weakness is where the short legs get realized and the long legs get fed.

So Hayloo’s book stays where it was: net short, 65/35, hedged since January, paid 8.20% a year in funding by everyone who showed up too early to the bull market. The one change we are working toward is the Solana leg, and it is not a change of view. Solana now gives back 83 cents on Bitcoin’s down-days, its sixty-day beta is the lowest since June 3, and the gap between what it catches and what it loses has collapsed from a record 0.50 to 0.08. The amplifier stopped amplifying. We bank that one on weakness and keep the Bitcoin leg, collecting a yield most bond traders only dream about.

Funding rate carry — income, and it improved again. Our patience in holding the short rests on leveraged traders buying early. The trailing four-week smoothed mean of daily funding income reads +$1,977.63 a day, which annualizes to +$721,837 and 8.20% of equity, up from 7.32% a week ago. Both funding rates are positive against our net-short book, so both short legs collect while the market sits in a coma.

Next levels that fire. Downside: $52,748 on Bitcoin and $65 on Solana, both Long Add and Short Take-Profit. Upside: $68,827 on Bitcoin and $90 on Solana.

Position vs. thesis. The levels that actually get tested this month sit inside the range where this book has nothing to do, and we are paid 8.20% a year by leveraged longs to do exactly that.

— Lead Trader (Jordi Federer)

Forward Thesis

We are looking to exit the Solana leg on weakness, and we are patient about it. The crowd is positioned for a liquidity relief we do not expect before 2027. Until that arrives we skew the balance of risk to the downside, because the mechanics of a break are asymmetric here.

A rally has to climb through $68,827 into the cohort that has rejected break-even nine times since October, on the thinnest volume in seven years. A break down runs into a bid band a third thinner than July’s, with 1.36 days of open interest stacked above it.

The downside ladder, with the standing rungs at live values: $58,500 is the June low and the first real structural test. Realized Price at $52,748 is the deep floor, the level where the average coin in existence finally sits underwater.

What would change our mind, each against its current value:

1. The Shadow Monetary Base three-month rate clearly positive and free of base effects, with the annual rate turning up alongside it. This week printed the opposite on both legs for a fifth time: −5.7% and −0.5%.

2. A sustained reclaim of $68,827 on rising volume with the fund channel actually buying. Now $63,686, on the lowest spot volume in seven years.

3. The realized profit-loss ratio holding above 2.0 with confirmed accumulation. Now 0.3504. Far.

4. Fed liquidity expanding materially rather than flatlining. Now flat, with the reserve purchase programme at roughly 40% of its peak size.

Watchlist

• Bitcoin at $68,827 — recent-buyer break-even. The named way this book is wrong inside a month. A reclaim on rising volume with the fund channel buying opens an air pocket to $83,000 behind it.

• Bitcoin at $58,500 — the June low. Into a bid band a third thinner than the one that caught it, with 1.36 days of open interest above.

• Hormuz transit counts, not headlines. Six then eight vessels against more than a hundred a day before the war.

• The next liquidity engine print. A sixth consecutive negative print hardens the read. A bounce toward −1% says the deep readings were a revision artifact and reopens the whole transmission map.

• Spot volume. The single number that adjudicates the leveraged-fund flip. A directional move on returning volume is a change of mind. One without it is a yield trade.

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The Team

Jordi Federer — Lead Trader. Owns the book and the publication. Sizing, staging, and every decision that moves capital.

Theodore Brennan — Chief Macro Strategist. Central-bank reaction functions, the dollar, and the rate path.

Julian Harlow — Global Liquidity Director. The liquidity engine, the collateral multiplier, and the transmission lag into price.

Margaux Lindqvist — Geopolitical Intelligence Officer. State behavior, escalation mechanics, and the tails that reprice commodities.

Marcus Vasquez — Hard Asset Strategist. Gold, the debasement basket, and the hard-money ratios.

Sienna Whitfield — Inflation & Real Asset Analyst. Energy, the inflation impulse, and the real-asset complex.

Priya Sandoval — Capital Flow Analyst. Fund flows, positioning, derivatives, and where the marginal dollar comes from.

Charlotte Donovan — Fundamental Research Analyst. On-chain cohorts, cost bases, and the structural read beneath the tape.

Lukas Marchetti — Technical Analyst. Market structure, moving-average regimes, and the levels that fire.

Disclaimer

The information is provided for information purposes only and on the basis that it will not be relied upon. No information contained herein constitutes a personal recommendation or investment advice.

The information (including any expressions of opinion or forecast) has been obtained from, or is based on, sources believed by the author to be reliable, but are not guaranteed as to their accuracy or completeness and should not be relied upon. The information is provided without obligation on the part of the author and on the understanding that any person who acts upon it or changes his investment position in reliance on it does so entirely at his own risk. The information does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Information is current only as at the date it is first posted and may no longer be true or complete when viewed by you. All information may be changed or amended without prior notice.

No representation, warranty or undertaking is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information by the author and no liability is accepted by the author for the accuracy or completeness of such information. In no event will the author be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of any use of the information, including, without limitation, any lost profits.

You should be aware that the Internet is not a completely reliable transmission medium. The author does not accept any liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the product or services referred to herein.

The materials provided here including text, photographs and other images, are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property rights. All copyright (and any other intellectual property rights) in these materials is either owned by the author, or is used by the author under licence.

Tape of the Week

Anyone who checks four prices and goes back to bed had a good week. The S&P 500 closed around records, crude fell on Trump’s headfakes, gold held due to the Chinese bid, and Bitcoin is in a coma.

The thing that drives all four fell off a cliff underneath them. GLI’s Shadow Monetary Base went from −1.1% three-month annualized to −5.4% in one print, and the annual leg slipped from −0.1% to −0.4% without a central bank anywhere, at least not in this universe, providing support. This dry well will hit the pipe in roughly a quarter.

Bitcoin is writing its’ own obituary this week, for every dollar of profit taken more than two dollars of loss went with it, every goddamn day of the week. Roughly 13,700 coins moved onto exchanges over four days after Coldcard, the self-custody name the hardest holders trust, told users its keys could (and would) be cracked. Bitcoin slept through the robbery on $470 million of spot volume, the lowest in coin terms since 2019.

The rest of the week fills in around that. Two treasuries are now holding hands with one yen, gold’s floor is being set in Beijing rather than Washington, and no ship moves through Hormuz but the oil price ticks with Donal Trump’s brain-farts.

Our book is short crypto into this liquidity contraction that just deepened, and if you want to argue our directional call you can, we’ve been short crypto since January, and we might have grown a bit fat and lazy. However, funding pays us a whopping 7.32% annualized to sit still, so we’ll sit out another Treasury auction and keep cashing in.

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Liquidity Tape

The liquidity engine did not drift this week. It fell. The Global Liquidity Index’s (GLI) Shadow Monetary Base printed −5.4% three-month annualized against −1.1% a week ago, the annual rate went from −0.1% to −0.4%, and the nominal base slipped to $109.5 trillion from a revised $109.7 trillion. This is the second consecutive print with both timeframes below zero.

The latest liquidity contraction is a global trend, with even the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) draining liquidity, which will hit financial markets in Q4 2026. We’re in a Crescendo towards more leverage corrections, with three-month growth contracting.

Bond volatility averaged 76 last week against roughly 100 since 2022 and a March peak of 115, which is probably the US Treasury deliberately suppressing Treasuries. All central banks globally, including the Fed, drain liquidity right now. The Treasury deliberately squeezing liquidity out of a muted bond market is a structure that does not unwind gently.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow)

Macro Tape

Two treasuries are now holding one currency line. The first joint US-Japan intervention since 1998 landed on July 31. The yen strengthened, the dollar eased, but that usually doesn’t hold. Which is why the US Treasury Secretary also asked the Federal Reserve to upsize a facility Japan can draw on, and the explicit purpose of that request is to stop Japan from having to sell Treasuries to fund its own defence.

What’s rather peculiar about the self-serving US support of Japan is the Japanese easing of taxes on food items by 800% in the same week, without announcing any fiscal measures that should close the gap. So, in a nutshell, the way our desk reads the American-supported rescue of the yen is that it is an unsustainable closed loop among friends that owe each other a lot of solids, and the minute the money flowed, the one in need went on a spending spree. Sounds like Japan first, America second.

The geopolitical short-term read is that the coordinated intervention worked, the USD/JPY pair eased. The macro read is that a credit line requiring two treasuries and a central-bank backstop is broken.

Which seams a good moment to remind US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent of the standard he set for himself in better years: judge me by the 10-year. Will do, Scott. The 30-year sits near a 19-year high, the 10-year cleared 4.70%, the 30-year mortgage hit a one-year high at 6.66%, and $827 billion has gone to servicing the debt this fiscal year — more than the United States spent on defence, on the Associated Press’s count.

Kevin Warsh, the new Fed chair, withholds guidance, floats meeting fewer times a year, and thinks out loud about moving the goalposts on inflation. Brandywine Global and Wellington both warned this week that the risk of a deeper Treasury rout is rising, and both named the silence as the reason. Warsh’s posture adds a term premium on top of bonds without him lifting a damn finger, and a US economy that just printed its fastest manufacturing month since 2022 gives him no reason to stop.

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

Geopolitical Tape

Oil is priced on headlines while the strait stays shut, and the barrel treats brain-farts from the US president as real enough to move. Eight ships went through Hormuz on Sunday and eleven on Saturday, against more than a hundred a day before the war. Kuwait’s exports have stopped completely. Another vessel was struck. Tehran denies asking for the talks the tape rallied on, and Trump has moved to demanding total surrender, even though the US president has been largely shut out of resolving a war he started. Watch the barrels rather than the Donald. The barrels are not moving.

Add insult to injury, there is a second energy war running on its own clock. Ukraine struck a Saratov refinery and the Engels airfield inside this window, and the tape is pricing none of it. Iran dominates the read while Ukraine takes more refining capacity off the board.

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

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Commodity Tape

Forces outside the Middle East or Russia are filling the holes the strait left open. Supply from outside the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) hit records, with Brazil and Kazakhstan both at all-time highs. OPEC+ restored the last of its 2023 cuts with 188,000 barrels a day for September while explicitly keeping further capacity for after the war ends. Supply is arriving as the premium leaves.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

Hard Assets

Gold sits comfortably above $4,000, with Chinese institutional money buying every dip. In reality, the line the Chinese are defending is RMB27,000 an ounce, which is roughly $4,000. Looking at the exchange rate from the Chinese perspective, the thing to watch for gold becomes Chinese bond yields, and Chinese yields are falling.

With institutional money defending gold’s floor and oil following the US president into every rabbit hole, the Gold/Oil ratio widened to 54.03× from 49.94×, because crude fell and gold sat still. BTC/Gold sits at 15.46× flat, and still nowhere near the 20× early-bull band. The two hard assets now answer to two different central banks: the Fed drives Bitcoin and Beijing drives gold.

The copper leg is distorted this week and should not be read as confirmation of anything: US imports are running at their fastest rate in at least twelve years, front-running a tariff decision from Trump rather than responding to any real demand.

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Equity Tape

The scratch healed in a week. The S&P 500 is back above alll four rising trend lines. The artificial-intelligence (AI) trade, however, is undergoing some second guessing in Asia, without investors pulling in their horns. They are rotating away from the trade that has led the cycle, and their risk appetite is bite-sized.

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

Hayloo’s Crypto Tape Week 32 – Bitcoin slept through a robbery

On-Chain Tape

Bitcoin’s realized profit-loss ratio fell to 0.443 — more than two dollars of loss realized for every dollar of profit. Loss-taking has dominated on-chain spending every single day of the week, not one day came even near the 1.0 balance line. This is the section that runs against the calm everywhere else, and it is the strongest divergence in the week.

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Long-term-holder realized loss on a 30-day average rose for a third consecutive print to $297.1 million, from $271.5 million and $224.7 million before that. Percent of supply in profit fell to 52.6% from 56.0%. Short-term holders are underwater on average and their cohort is running a 6.3% loss. Bitcoin spending is happening at a small loss everywhere.

Exchange netflow ran +2,877 BTC onto venues on the day and roughly 13,700 across four, after Coldcard, Bitcoin’s most coveted self-custody name, was cracked by an attacker finding weak keys. On August 4 the company told users to move their coins, because the flaw was still live on specific models and firmware, and the exchange OKX reported record inflows to centralised exchanges the same day. The people most committed to holding Bitcoin in cold storage had just learned their preferred method carried an invisible flaw, and they moved.

At this point, demand for Bitcoin leverage is so weak that even the hack of Bitcoin’s most coveted cold-storage device doesn’t force anyone out of anything, and the story didn’t matter at all. Bitcoin slept through the robbery of its own core, confident that part of its advancement is that custody by private, regulated Swiss vault managers, somewhere dug into the Alps, is kind of sexy the way a Coldcard was sexy in 2021.

More coins changed hands between $62,000 and $68,000 than at any other price in Bitcoin’s history, yet the current spot volume is dead — $470 million on the day, and in coin terms the lowest since 2019, with Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) open interest back at 2023 levels. Bitcoin is basically in a coma. The clinical death of Bitcoin normally resolves to the upside. We just don’t hold our breath yet.

Strategy sold another 1,638 coins for $104.7 million, raised $290.6 million of common stock, bought back $81.2 million of its own preferred, and held that preferred’s dividend at 12% while the shares trade below par. A treasury company selling stock to hold dollars to pay dividends on a Bitcoin position. That’s it. That’s the sentiment. If there is no bottom somewhere below that statement, then there is no floor at all...

— Capital Flow Analyst (Priya Sandoval) · Fundamental Research Analyst (Charlotte Donovan)

Dominance is falling and the altcoin majors are catching up

Bitcoin dominance fell to a three-month low. Bitcoin’s share of total crypto market value is 56.5% and falling, trading below its 50-day and 150-day average. Falling dominance means Bitcoin is losing share and everything else is gaining it, which is what we are reading in all of the major altcoin series.

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Hayloo’s Alt Tax Week 32 – All the three Majors charge a Bitcoin Tax

Hayloo’s Perp Book

Size and direction. Hayloo’s book remains net short both legs, it did nothing this week, but earned funding fees. Bitcoin: −231.100 coins net, an entry-net of −$16,205,413 and −$14,776,303 at mark. Solana: −36,000 coins net, −$2,052,162 entry-net and −$2,661,120 at mark.

Funding Rate Carry — income, and it improved. The trailing four-week smoothed mean of daily funding rate income reads +$1,766.71 a day, which annualizes to +$644,850 and 7.32% of equity, up from 6.66% a week ago. Both funding rates are positive against a net-short book, so both short legs collect.

Next levels that fire. Downside: $55,000 on Bitcoin and $55 on Solana, both Long Add and Short Take-Profit. Upside: $98,000 on Bitcoin and $90 on Solana.

Position vs. thesis. The book is short into a liquidity contraction that just deepened and an on-chain tape where loss-taking dominated every day of the week. It is also short into a range where nothing on either ladder is within reach of spot. That combination is exactly the zone where this book has nothing to do, and it is being paid 7.32% a year to sit back and wait.

— Lead Trader (Jordi Federer)

Forward Thesis

We didn’t move this week, but our clock did. A falling liquidity engine print is a new trough rather than an extension of the old one, which pushes the deepest transmission pressure out to early November and demotes late August to the first and milder of two windows. We had been treating late August as the main event. It is now the warm-up, and that is a change in when the pressure lands rather than whether it does.

Bitcoin works inside the $62,000 to $68,000 shelf until something takes it out. The first wall above is the short-term-holder cost basis at $69,337, 8.44% overhead and further away than it was last week. Behind that sits the long-term-holder block at $83,000 to $86,000. The downside ladder runs to the realized price at $52,796, the average price at which every coin in circulation last moved.

Since Bitcoin is arguably already dead, and spot volumes as well as leveraged positioning confirm there is little life, we argue for a grind. There are breakouts and there are breakdowns, and we expect neither. A decisive reclaim of $69,337 on returning volume with the fund channel actually buying opens the air pocket toward $83,000. A loss of the shelf with exchange inflows continuing accelerates toward $55,000, where the staged sizes stand for first contact. We are positioned for the slow grind down.

What would change our mind:

1. The Shadow Monetary Base three-month rate clearly positive and non-base-effect, with the annual rate turning up at the same time. This week printed the exact opposite on both legs: −5.4% and −0.4%. Moved decisively further away.

2. The realized profit-loss ratio sustained above 2.0 across multiple weeks, with confirmed accumulation. Now 0.443, and every daily print in the window below the balance line. Moved further away.

3. A Bitcoin weekly close above $69,000 with sustained spot demand.

4. A sustained run of S&P 500 closes below its 20-day line.

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Watchlist

• WTI’s coming weekly close against the 100-week line at $71.63.

• The yen at 155. The named test of whether the joint intervention holds. A second round that fails to hold is the escalation, and it would land inside an ugly liquidity contraction.

• The next liquidity engine print. A third consecutive double-negative hardens the Tape’s read. A bounce back toward −1.1% says the −5.4% was a revision artifact rather than a trough.

• Bitcoin at $69,337 — the short-term-holder cost basis. The named way this book is wrong inside a month, with the air pocket to $83,000 behind it. It moved further overhead this week rather than closer.

• Whether the relocated coins ever trade. Roughly 13,700 coins moved to exchanges over four days on a custody scare. Fear, not selling. The only thing worth watching is whether they actually change hands on strength.

• The realized profit-loss ratio at 0.443. The weekly halving sits on a series that swings hard day to day, so it is either capitulation building or an artifact. The next print says which.

• Asia against Wall Street. GLI risk-appetite gauge has Korea at +61 against a +79 peak while Europe takes the flow. One tape is pricing the ceasefire and the other the artificial-intelligence unwind, and they cannot both be right for long.

• Chinese bond yields and PBoC liquidity. The newly named instrument panel for gold’s floor at $4,000, with spot 3.42% above it.

• Strategy’s STRC at $92.32. Below par and the best level in weeks, while the company sold another 1,638 coins and raised $290.6 million of stock.

The Team

Jordi Federer — Lead Trader. Owns the book and the publication. Sizing, staging, and every decision that moves capital.

Theodore Brennan — Chief Macro Strategist. Central-bank reaction functions, the dollar, and the rate path.

Julian Harlow — Global Liquidity Director. The liquidity engine, the collateral multiplier, and the transmission lag into price.

Margaux Lindqvist — Geopolitical Intelligence Officer. State behavior, escalation mechanics, and the tails that reprice commodities.

Marcus Vasquez — Hard Asset Strategist. Gold, the debasement basket, and the hard-money ratios.

Sienna Whitfield — Inflation & Real Asset Analyst. Energy, the inflation impulse, and the real-asset complex.

Priya Sandoval — Capital Flow Analyst. Fund flows, positioning, derivatives, and where the marginal dollar comes from.

Charlotte Donovan — Fundamental Research Analyst. On-chain cohorts, cost bases, and the structural read beneath the tape.

Lukas Marchetti — Technical Analyst. Market structure, moving-average regimes, and the levels that fire.

Disclaimer

The information is provided for information purposes only and on the basis that it will not be relied upon. No information contained herein constitutes a personal recommendation or investment advice.

The information (including any expressions of opinion or forecast) has been obtained from, or is based on, sources believed by the author to be reliable, but are not guaranteed as to their accuracy or completeness and should not be relied upon. The information is provided without obligation on the part of the author and on the understanding that any person who acts upon it or changes his investment position in reliance on it does so entirely at his own risk. The information does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Information is current only as at the date it is first posted and may no longer be true or complete when viewed by you. All information may be changed or amended without prior notice.

No representation, warranty or undertaking is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information by the author and no liability is accepted by the author for the accuracy or completeness of such information. In no event will the author be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of any use of the information, including, without limitation, any lost profits.

You should be aware that the Internet is not a completely reliable transmission medium. The author does not accept any liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the product or services referred to herein.

The materials provided here including text, photographs and other images, are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property rights. All copyright (and any other intellectual property rights) in these materials is either owned by the author, or is used by the author under licence.

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Tape of the Week

Last Thursday, inside about fifty minutes, Japan’s Ministry of Finance bought the yen five figures off its weakest level since 1986 while the New York Fed worked the phones on Treasury’s behalf. The same day, American ordnance landed on three Iranian cities, the Revolutionary Guard claimed a hit on a US base in Kuwait, and Microsoft reported its fastest cloud growth in four years. Bitcoin’s response to all of it was roughly that of a parked car.

That was one day. The week around it held a Fed that froze its rate and got punished for it — a 19-year high in the 30-year bond — a Korean stock market that died and resurrected in biblical succession. The loudest week of the summer landed on the quietest market in three years. Because right now, nobody gets paid to move.

Since February a plain Treasury bill has paid more than the classic Bitcoin trade — buy the coin, sell the future, pocket the gap — so the pros sit still in bills. Five months now, the second-longest stretch on record, and the only longer one ended at the bottom of the last bear.

A market where everyone is on retainer does nothing. Until liquidity contraction reaches an overheated energy market in late August, no bell will end the beauty’s sleep.

Liquidity Tape

The liquidity engine behind everything had a bad week, and it matters more than anything else. Global liquidity — the world’s pool of money free to chase assets — fell a fourth straight week, to $193.6 trillion. The engine inside it, Michael Howell’s Shadow Monetary Base, shrank to $109.6 trillion, and for the first time this cycle both of its clocks read negative at once: the fast three-month clock at −1.1%, a third straight red, and the slow twelve-month clock crossing zero to −0.1%.

Honesty about that second number: a tenth of a point below zero is statistical noise, one revision from vanishing. But a crossing is a crossing — noise to a statistician, a bell to a trader. It changes our posture, not our position, and next week’s print gets our hawk-eyes.

Beijing is actually adding to the pool, but Beijing is alone. The Bank of England, a firmer dollar, and depreciating collateral keep draining liquidity, and the Federal Reserve now sits a second straight week among them.

The last time the world’s money plumbing behaved like this, in 2021 and 2022, the S&P went on to lose a quarter and Bitcoin three-quarters. That tail is what our short position was cut out for.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow)

Macro Tape

The Federal Reserve did nothing on Wednesday, and the bond market punished the board for the privilege. The interest rate hold came in 9-3 — three dissents, the most rebellious room since 2016 — and inside an hour the 30-year had spiked fourteen basis points to 5.23%, a level last seen nineteen years ago. The 30-year mortgage now starts with a six. Scott Bessent spent the good years asking to be judged by the 10-year yield. It sits at 4.66% against 3.97% before the war. The judgment is in, and it isn’t the one Bessent ordered.

Kevin Warsh floated changing how inflation gets measured — the chairman’s version of moving the goalposts after the shots sailed wide. The market ignored the stagecraft and priced the substance: a September hike near 60%, December is done and in the books. The growth data offered no exit — 1.5% headline growth with consumers spending 3.2% more and paying 3.5% more frees nobody — and Trump’s tariff wall has settled into what markets now price as a standing American regime of uncertainty.

The yen bled toward 164 before Tokyo blinked — five yen in fifty minutes. The New York Fed ran the check on Treasury’s behalf, and Bessent propped up the yen on TV. Washington didn’t just bless the yen intervention; it held the other end of the operation. Next morning the Bank of Japan held rates at 1%, and talked a tough game, raising its own inflation forecast — propping the currency with one hand, hardening the case for tighter money with the other. Around the region: India spent $7 billion on the rupee, Indonesia’s central-bank governor quit early, and big managers now openly weigh Australian and European bonds over Treasuries. Hayloo’s very own Geopolitical Intelligence Officer Margaux Lindqvist calls the international stint “authorities getting ahead of a disorderly unwind” — a defense that worked.

But Hayloo’s Chief Macro Strategist Theodore Brennan reads it darker: “a line that needs the US Treasury to hold is built too close to the fire.” The arithmetic is shared either way: a central bank raising its inflation call while propping its currency is the carry trade’s worst arrangement, and if that trade unwinds, it unwinds into a contracting liquidity engine — it’s just insult added to injury.

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

Geopolitical Tape

It wasn’t a pause. It was a gun being reloaded in front of us. Five quiet days drained 8.7% out of crude oil; a Tuesday-night salvo over Jordan, strikes across seven Iraqi provinces, tankers boarded inside Hormuz, Oman’s compromise rejected and a claimed hit in Kuwait put most of it back in one night. That is the whole chronology. Nobody used the quiet to talk — they used it to shop for ammunition.

The front worth studying is the one nobody is shooting on. At Bab el-Mandeb the Houthis no longer run a blockade; they run a customs post. Chinese ships sail through, Saudi hulls get turned or hit. Beijing collects its barrels at market price, Riyadh watches its own coastline tax its own exports, and everyone else pays the toll in miles — around the Cape, a month longer, roughly $2.5 million a voyage, costs that outlive any ceasefire. Because insurers reprice risk in years, not news cycles.

At Hayloo, we never priced a war premium that evaporates on a handshake, much rather we expect the premium to morph into the cost of doing business. Our short book is positioned for the repricing of the latter.

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Commodity Tape

A regime is a relationship to a line, not a week’s direction. The barrel gave back 11% of its war premium and still sits 15% above a 100-week average that is itself rising — a market this twitchy on headlines can’t see the forest for the trees, and the forest changed in February. Energy is a different input cost now, and the only thing that turns this ship around unharmed is the strait reopening free of charge. Good luck with that.

What the new regime buys us is a chain with every link pointing one way: expensive energy floors inflation, floored inflation keeps the next move a hike, hikes keep the engine draining — the exact weather that inspires our continued short position.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

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Hard Assets

Gold spent the week surviving its own audit. The World Gold Council revised first-quarter central-bank buying down by 187 tons — to 57. Read that twice: the buyer the entire gold price leans on was, for a quarter, mostly a bookkeeping mirage. The floor held anyway, because the physical buyer showed up where the paper one faded — China imported roughly 173 tons in June, a two-year high, third monthly rise running.

The week’s gain — 2.96% above the floor, still 6.6% under the 20-week line — came from the dollar: gold rose when Tokyo’s intervention knocked the dollar down. A currency effect in a bull costume; the structural bid stayed quiet.

The ratios are the reality filter. Gold/Oil at 49.94× has moved five straight weeks on the barrel alone which says this inflation is a supply story, the kind no central bank can cut its way out of. BTC/Gold slipped to 15.49×, but the only moving parts were the long bond and the yen. The coin did no structural work.

And Strategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin: a fifth straight week without buying a coin, an $8.2 billion quarterly loss, a two-year dividend runway banked, its financing vehicle $10.50 under par. A Bitcoin treasury company is selling stock to hold dollars to pay Bitcoin dividends. That’s it. That’s the sentiment. There must be a bottom somewhere below that statement.

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Equity Tape

The scratch became a run: six straight closes below the 20-day, and for the first time this cycle the 20-day and 50-day are both falling — two coats of paint peeling at once while the deep trend rises untouched underneath.

The crack opened in Seoul, where the AI trade is priced hardest. Nvidia’s roughly $750 billion web of circular supply-and-financing deals — the supplier bankrolling its customers’ ability to buy — put a dollar figure on the market’s ugliest suspicion: the demand signal isn’t independent. The Kospi dropped 10% in a session, 25% off its June peak; SK Hynix printed record profit and still missed; Samsung grew chip profit 250-fold to a shrug — a trade priced for divine perfection. The S&P lost 1.5%, the Nasdaq 100 slid into an 11% correction.

Then the epicenter healed itself. Microsoft’s fastest cloud growth in four years and Amazon’s beat landed against Meta’s miss, and the market drew a bright line: it pays for revenue that already printed money — Microsoft up 9% — and punishes promises financed in a circle — Meta down 8%. Friday the Kospi ripped 17%, SK Hynix nearly 30%, and the S&P closed the month at 7,489.72, back above the 20-day on the final print. One close is a poke, not a repair. At Hayloo we stopped looking at the hype. We are looking at trend lines, and the trend lines are topping.

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

On-Chain Tape

Walk the room, it’s empty. Exchange traffic is the quietest in three years; spot volume, counted in coins, the lowest since 2019; balances flat since early July. The tourists who stormed the ETF turnstiles last week went home as foreseen, seven-day flows swinging to minus $433 million from plus $711 million.

This year’s buyer’s cost-basis sits at $68,264, seven percent overhead, the line that decides the next leg. Below it, price sits in the busiest band on the chart — more coins changed hands between $62,000 and $68,000 than at any other price in Bitcoin’s history. Half those owners are underwater and sell every bounce; that caps the rallies. The other half sat through the whole decline and sell nothing; they catch the dips. One band, two crowds — the mechanical definition of a range. We argue patience.

Volatility is the narrowest since January, a quiet market before the storm? Volatility this tight, this close under a wall, resolves with a move, not a drift. Below $62,000 sits the Bitcoin trapdoor, where dealers stop absorbing selling and their own hedges force them to join the rout.

In a leveraged market whose biggest buyer is managing its debt with dollars instead of Bitcoin, a break of the shelf would not drift — it would run. Our shorts from January remain open for that run; the ladder beneath is where we buy.

— Capital Flow Analyst (Priya Sandoval) · Fundamental Research Analyst (Charlotte Donovan)

Hayloo’s Perp Book

Size and direction. Net short, both legs. Bitcoin: −231.100 coins net, −$16,205,413 at entry. Solana: −36,000 net, −$2,052,162 at entry. Equity: $8,847,690, up 4.69% on a week Bitcoin fell 1.72% and Solana 4.15%.

The Solana leg. Solana paid a tax to Bitcoin for the past 4 weeks. The short stays as sized. Nothing near a trigger.

Funding rate carry. The trailing month pays +$1,770.83 a day — $646,352 a year, 7.31% of equity — with Friday the best single day of the window. Both funding rates positive, both short legs collecting. This is Hayloo’s version of a retainer. The best way to spend the worst phase of a cycle. Stay short and collect funding from bulls too early to show balls.

Next levels we watch. Down: $62,000 Bitcoin, $70 Solana — let’s see if a crowd builds. Up: $68,264 and $90 — the short adds or invalidation.

— Lead Trader (Jordi Federer)

Forward Thesis

When nobody is paid to move, this range can last. If Bitcoin reclaims $68,264 on real volume with the ETF channel genuinely buying, there will be open air to the $83,000–$86,000 long-term-holder block. This is the single most likely way this book is wrong within a month.

Drop through the trapdoor at $62,000 and you can buy $55,000 Bitcoin in November. That’s where our long build begins. And we’re paid to wait.

What would change our mind, each against its current value:

1. The liquidity engine’s three-month rate clearly positive and non-base-effect, with the twelve-month turning up alongside. This week printed the exact opposite. We’re far away from cool.

2. The Realized Profit/Loss Ratio sustained above 2.0 with confirmed accumulation. Now 0.77, from 0.87. We’re moving the wrong way.

3. A weekly close above $69,000, sustained on volume. Now $63,791, 8.17% below; Coinbase the only bid, the venue sum still negative — the selling eased, but no buying occurred.

4. A sustained run of S&P closes below its twenty-day line. Equities ran six straight before Friday’s close interrupted the count, and the 20- and 50-day are still falling. The latter is the one we care about: The trend is tipping (look how we didn’t say topping).

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Watchlist

• The weekend’s scoreboard. It’s the monthly close, and we’ll look at Oil’s fifth weekly close inside the new energy regime (of rising prices), and Bitcoin dominance’s July close against its 100-week line at 60.0%.

• The engine’s next print. After a photo-finish, a second double-negative makes the liquidity trend official; the annual rate back above zero un-rings it.

• The wall at $68,264, 7.01% up. Still the named way this book is wrong within a month; a real reclaim opens the air to $83,000–$86,000.

• The $62,000–$68,000 shelf. Lose it with inflows waking and the tape runs through the $62,000 trapdoor toward the $55,000 ladder, where the long build begins.

• The yen near 160. A line held with Washington’s help. A second intervention that fails is the escalation, and it lands in a contracting liquidity window.

• The interrupted run. Whether Friday’s close above the 20-day was the break or a one-day poke; the falling 20- and 50-day answer the trend question.

The Team

Jordi Federer — Lead Trader. Owns the book and the publication. Sizing, staging, and every decision that moves capital.

Theodore Brennan — Chief Macro Strategist. Central-bank reaction functions, the dollar, and the rate path.

Julian Harlow — Global Liquidity Director. The liquidity engine, the collateral multiplier, and the transmission lag into price.

Margaux Lindqvist — Geopolitical Intelligence Officer. State behavior, escalation mechanics, and the tails that reprice commodities.

Marcus Vasquez — Hard Asset Strategist. Gold, the debasement basket, and the hard-money ratios.

Sienna Whitfield — Inflation & Real Asset Analyst. Energy, the inflation impulse, and the real-asset complex.

Priya Sandoval — Capital Flow Analyst. Fund flows, positioning, derivatives, and where the marginal dollar comes from.

Charlotte Donovan — Fundamental Research Analyst. On-chain cohorts, cost bases, and the structural read beneath the tape.

Lukas Marchetti — Technical Analyst. Market structure, moving-average regimes, and the levels that fire.

Disclaimer

The information is provided for information purposes only and on the basis that it will not be relied upon. No information contained herein constitutes a personal recommendation or investment advice.

The information (including any expressions of opinion or forecast) has been obtained from, or is based on, sources believed by the author to be reliable, but are not guaranteed as to their accuracy or completeness and should not be relied upon. The information is provided without obligation on the part of the author and on the understanding that any person who acts upon it or changes his investment position in reliance on it does so entirely at his own risk. The information does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Information is current only as at the date it is first posted and may no longer be true or complete when viewed by you. All information may be changed or amended without prior notice.

No representation, warranty or undertaking is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information by the author and no liability is accepted by the author for the accuracy or completeness of such information. In no event will the author be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of any use of the information, including, without limitation, any lost profits.

You should be aware that the Internet is not a completely reliable transmission medium. The author does not accept any liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the product or services referred to herein.

The materials provided here including text, photographs and other images, are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property rights. All copyright (and any other intellectual property rights) in these materials is either owned by the author, or is used by the author under licence.

Tape of the Week

The dumb money finally showed up. Three straight weeks of retail ETF inflows, the first sustained bid in a while, and it arrived the way retail always does: right before the price turns on them, chasing a candle that was gone by Thursday. Now look at what that bid was buying into. A liquidity engine at −1.8% three-month annualized, not the first negative print of the cycle. Brent approaching $100, with two chokepoints now burning. Price and backdrop disagree.

So the shape of the week is this: the sellers who made this bitcoin bear market happen are gone; the buyers who replaced them are tourists. The barrel is writing the rate path, and bitcoin acts as its proxy. That is not a bottom and not a breakout. It is a range with a war premium on top, and a short book is paid funding by hopetimists who crave Fed guidance.

Liquidity Tape

The engine is stalling in plain sight. Michael Howell’s Shadow Monetary Base printed −1.8% three-month annualized, from −1.3%, the fifth deceleration in a row: +5.6% to −1.8% in a little over a month. And the headline hides the trap. The nominal base rose to $110.1 trillion, because Beijing turned its taps back on; the level grows while the rate dies. Headline Global Liquidity slipped to $193.9 trillion, a third straight weekly decline, with three-month growth at 10.6% from 13.2% and annual at 6.4% from 7.0%. Still big numbers. All of them shrinking. Howell’s word is plateauing.

A fortnight ago we called the handoff from Beijing to Washington the most consequential fact on the tape, and our Capital Flow desk read the Fed’s return as the leading edge of this bitcoin bear market’s invalidation. We set the test ourselves: if the Fed is really injecting and the engine still sinks, that channel does not exist. This week’s print answered. The channel did not survive its own test.

Investors are pulling in their horns everywhere Howell measures. Global appetite fell for a second straight week, and the standing warning is that the rot shows in risk appetite before it shows in data.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow)

Geopolitical Tape

The war found the detour. Hormuz is shut, so Saudi Arabia quadrupled its loadings out of Yanbu, to four million barrels a day from 973,000 a year ago, and sent them down the Red Sea through Bab el-Mandeb. That lane carried 7.4 million barrels a day in June, 7% of the world’s oil. On Monday the Houthis declared a blockade of the kingdom. By Wednesday they sat off the strait. On Thursday they struck two Saudi tankers. The route around the war is now inside it.

Behind it, the main war ran its thirteenth straight night of US strikes. The Pentagon’s bill reached $37.5 billion, up nearly $8 billion in a week; sixteen Americans are dead and more than 430 wounded; the House passed a defense bill carrying a $1.15 trillion Pentagon request.

The freight arithmetic outlives the de-escalation headlines. Fully loaded supertankers cannot fit through Suez. The Sumed pipeline cannot absorb what they would drop. The Cape route adds four weeks to an Asia run. Shut Bab el-Mandeb outright and 7% of global supply comes off, on top of the 10% the Gulf fighting already took out. One chokepoint is in the price. The second is going in tanker by tanker.

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Commodity Tape

Oil has stopped asking permission. WTI sits at $92.66, up 14.69% on the week and 29.61% above its 100-week average at $71.49 — the widest gap of the series, over a line that is itself rising, up 1.68% on the quarter. Brent settled at $94.07 on Wednesday and traded above $95 on Thursday, its highest in nearly six weeks. Crude is up more than 20% this month. US gasoline sits just below $4 a gallon, a third above its pre-war level.

Three of the last four weekly closes have printed above that line, the first time this cycle the count has come this far. We are done calling this a spike; the fourth close, if it comes, is confirmation of a new regime.

What this is not is a demand story. The World Bank put the first institutional number on the war this week: global growth cut to 1.3% from last year’s 2.9%. A forecast, and it moves nothing on its own, but that is the demand shape underneath a $92 barrel. Crop prices hit a three-year high on the same broken logistics. A regime built on two burning chokepoints is still a regime. It ends when the straits open, not when the buyers tire.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

Macro Tape

The inflation relief is bought on a headline made of cheap gasoline — and that gasoline no longer exists. The market put the hikes back. The Fed meets July 28 and 29 and a hold is still the base case, but the oil spike lifted September hike odds to 53%, a coin flip, and December to roughly 80%. The growth data votes the same way: jobless claims and the Philadelphia Fed survey are not an economy begging for relief.

Japan is where it cuts skin. The yen slid past 163 to the dollar, its weakest since December 1986, and it did not blink when the Finance Minister threatened to act. Meanwhile carry trades are printing their best returns in decades, funded in yen at suppressed volatility.

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

Hard Assets

Gold is asleep, 9.16% under its 20-week average of $4,453. Oil is doing all the moving around it. Gold/Oil closed to 43.65× from 50.25×, down 13.13%, and for the fourth straight week the entire move came from the barrel. BTC/Gold ticked up to 16.05× from 15.96× — still below the 20× early-bull band, and it rose only because Bitcoin received some ETF love. Nobody mistake that for structural work.

Beijing restarting its injections after a three-month pause will help the gold leg, because the detail that matters is where that Chinese money is allowed to go. The mainland’s crypto ban sends that money to gold, while Bitcoin sits waiting on a Fed that has not eased. Two hard assets, two different central banks holding the keys.

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Equity Tape

The equity market took its first scratch. SPY closed Thursday under its 20-day line. Everything larger still points up: all four trend lines are rising, the structure is intact, the paint is not.

The crack, if it comes, has an address: the AI trade. A free frontier model out of China knocked the Philadelphia semiconductor index into a bear market, more than 20% off its June record, and hedge funds have dumped US technology in six of the last eight weeks, the heaviest such stretch in at least a decade.

Alphabet grew its cloud backlog past $500 billion, raised its spending forecast — and fell nearly 5% after hours for it. Tesla missed. IBM cut.

Our Capital Flow desk sees a raised capex guide against a half-trillion-dollar backlog and calls the spending cycle funded, which keeps equity breadth standing. Our Chief Macro Strategist and Global Liquidity Director see a stock punished 5% for good revenue and bigger spending and call it the moment the market stops paying for capex — the road to the sustained break below trend that would flip our equity read. Amazon reports July 30. Either Thursday’s close was a scratch, or it was the first of a run.

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

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On-Chain Tape

The dumb money finally piled in. June was the worst month of ETF outflows on record; then the channel flipped, and retail has now bought six straight days. Notice what did not arrive with the dumb money: leverage. Funding sat at neutral the entire month, hedges are at their lowest of the year, crash insurance went unrenewed. This rally is shorts surrendering, not conviction.

Retail bought its empty candle straight into the people waiting to leave. The average buyer of the past five months paid about $69,000 and has been underwater ever since; this week’s price finally came home to him, and a man getting his money back after months of losing sells. The candle died to the dollar at his door.

The sellers who made this bear market are leaving. Tourists chasing a green candle are who replaced them. Glassnode holds the line: “This is still a bear-market rally.”

— Capital Flow Analyst (Priya Sandoval) · Fundamental Research Analyst (Charlotte Donovan)

Hayloo’s Perp Book

Size and direction. Hayloo’s book remains net short. Bitcoin: −201.586 coins, an entry-net of −$14,147,461 and −$13,084,719 at mark. Solana: −36,719.84 coins, −$2,306,000 entry-net and −$2,819,349 at mark. Equity reads $8,451,654, up 0.09% on a week Bitcoin gained 0.15% — the book made nothing and banked a little funding.

Funding Rate Carry — income, and the mix shifted. The trailing four-week smoothed mean of daily carry reads +$1,541.88 a day, which annualizes to +$562,785 and 6.66% of equity.

Next levels that fire. Downside: $55,000 Bitcoin at −15.27% and $55 Solana, both Long Add and Short Take-Profit. Upside: $69,000 Bitcoin and $90 Solana.

Position vs. thesis. The book is positioned to harvest weakness and build the long leg at first contact with the ladder below spot. The current range is the zone where this book has nothing to do, and being paid to do nothing is the current position.

— Lead Trader (Jordi Federer)

Forward Thesis

We are still short bitcoin and solana, and the argument has changed shape underneath us. The direction holds; the crash we were positioned for got cancelled. The cohort that was dumping $280 million of losses a day has eased off. The dumb money turned the ETF channel positive. Hedges are off, shorts are folded — the fuel a violent flush needed is simply not in the market anymore. What is left is a market the sellers have abandoned and the buyers visit as tourists, and that is a range, not a leg anywhere.

The range has an address on each end. Bitcoin works between the $63,000 shelf, where a tenth of all supply was bought, and the $69,000 door, where five months of underwater buyers get their money back. Reclaim $69,000 on real spot flow and there is nothing overhead until $84,000; get rejected there and price walks back to the shelf. All of our decisions live outside the box the market currently lives in.

The engine’s clock still points the same way: a negative liquidity print keeps the deepest headwind ahead of us, and if the descent continues it maps into the fourth quarter. This week’s −1.8% is no new trough — late May was far deeper. It is a second descent.

What would change our mind, each against its current value:

1. The Shadow Monetary Base three-month rate clearly positive and non-base-effect, with the twelve-month rate turning up at the same time. Now −1.8% on a second consecutive negative, the twelve-month at +0.5% and disclaimed by Howell himself as a base effect. This one moved decisively toward the short.

2. The Realized Profit/Loss Ratio sustained above 2.0 across multiple weeks, with confirmed accumulation. Now −0.5 from −0.8, loss-taking still dominant. Far.

3. A weekly close above $69,000 with sustained spot demand on both major venues. Now $64,909, and spot buying still net negative at −$55.3 million even after narrowing hard.

4. A sustained run of S&P 500 closes below its twenty-day line. The first close printed Thursday; every trend line still rises. This one fires toward escalation, not relief.

Watchlist

• Bitcoin at $69,000 — the Short-Term Holder cost basis, 6.31% up. The named overhead wall, where the people most inclined to sell are the ones about to be made whole. A decisive reclaim on persistent spot inflows opens an air pocket to $84,000 and removes the on-chain leg of this short; it is still the most likely way this book is wrong within a month.

• Bitcoin at $63,000 — the demand shelf, 2.94% down. The heaviest cost-basis concentration on the chart, roughly a tenth of supply. Where a rejection at the wall sends price.

• WTI against its rising 100-week average at $71.49. Three of the last four weekly closes have printed above the line. One more makes it a regime by our own standard, for the first time this cycle.

• Bab el-Mandeb. Two Saudi tankers struck, at least seven turned around, and Yanbu is still loading. A full closure removes 7% of global supply on top of the 10% already out.

• Howell’s next print. A third consecutive negative confirms the second descent and maps the headwind toward the fourth quarter. A return above zero says the last two were the artifact.

• The Fed’s place on Howell’s driver list. It moved from support to limiting factor in one week. A second week on the drag side ends the re-injection case for good.

• Amazon on July 30, the Fed on July 28–29. The earnings print that resolves whether the market keeps paying for capex, and the statement that rules on how much of the oil spike reaches the rate path.

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The Team

Jordi Federer — Lead Trader. Owns the book and the publication. Sizing, staging, and every decision that moves capital.

Theodore Brennan — Chief Macro Strategist. Central-bank reaction functions, the dollar, and the rate path.

Julian Harlow — Global Liquidity Director. The liquidity engine, the collateral multiplier, and the transmission lag into price.

Margaux Lindqvist — Geopolitical Intelligence Officer. State behavior, escalation mechanics, and the tails that reprice commodities.

Marcus Vasquez — Hard Asset Strategist. Gold, the debasement basket, and the hard-money ratios.

Sienna Whitfield — Inflation & Real Asset Analyst. Energy, the inflation impulse, and the real-asset complex.

Priya Sandoval — Capital Flow Analyst. Fund flows, positioning, derivatives, and where the marginal dollar comes from.

Charlotte Donovan — Fundamental Research Analyst. On-chain cohorts, cost bases, and the structural read beneath the tape.

Lukas Marchetti — Technical Analyst. Market structure, moving-average regimes, and the levels that fire.

Disclaimer

The information is provided for information purposes only and on the basis that it will not be relied upon. No information contained herein constitutes a personal recommendation or investment advice.

The information (including any expressions of opinion or forecast) has been obtained from, or is based on, sources believed by the author to be reliable, but are not guaranteed as to their accuracy or completeness and should not be relied upon. The information is provided without obligation on the part of the author and on the understanding that any person who acts upon it or changes his investment position in reliance on it does so entirely at his own risk. The information does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.

Information is current only as at the date it is first posted and may no longer be true or complete when viewed by you. All information may be changed or amended without prior notice.

No representation, warranty or undertaking is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information by the author and no liability is accepted by the author for the accuracy or completeness of such information. In no event will the author be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of any use of the information, including, without limitation, any lost profits.

You should be aware that the Internet is not a completely reliable transmission medium. The author does not accept any liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the product or services referred to herein.

The materials provided here including text, photographs and other images, are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property rights. All copyright (and any other intellectual property rights) in these materials is either owned by the author, or is used by the author under licence.

The sellers who made this bitcoin bear market are, at the margin, quitting. Glassnode’s long-term holder realized-loss curve turned down from its peak. For bitcoin’s price to reverse, however, a buyer must show up. With Michael Howell’s Shadow Monetary Base printing a three-month annualized rate of −1.3% this week, the bull case for bitcoin currently is absent. Bitcoin’s spot volume fell 21.5%, active addresses sit near their lower bound, and the week’s relief rally rode thin liquidity – a bottom without flooring. On-Chain and liquidity data run on different clocks. So the honest shape of the next quarter is a market without buyers, a well drying out in a volatile range of macro and geo.

Liquidity Tape

Howell’s Shadow Monetary Base three-month annualized rate went from +2.3% to negative −1.3% this week, on a nominal base of $109.82 trillion down from a revised $110.17 trillion. Note the revision: the same series was reported at $110.3 trillion last week. Four consecutive weekly decelerations, and the fourth crossed the line. Howell’s own framing is that liquidity has stalled, signaling a maturing cycle.

Global risk exposure fell from Latin America to Africa and Asia, Headline Global Liquidity slipped to $194.01 trillion from $194.08 trillion, with three-month growth at 13.2% from 15.6% and annual growth at 7.0% from 7.8%. Both at strong levels but falling.

Fed liquidity expansion supports for the second consecutive week. But a Fed adding liquidity for a fortnight inside a cycle where the Fed is a net drag is arithmetic. Hayloo’s desk disagrees on what to do with the Fed’s two weeks of injection. Capital Flow reads it as the leading edge of an autumn of relief, Liquidity and Macro read a composition shift inside a system that keeps draining all year.

Both desks are reading the same two pieces at different timeframes. The resolver is clean: whether the three-month rate turns back up on Fed liquidity inside a month. If the Fed is really injecting and the engine still goes lower, Capital Flow’s channel does not exist.

— Global Liquidity Director (Julian Harlow)

Macro Tape

June’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) came in below consensus on every line. Headline fell 0.4% on the month, the largest monthly decline since April 2020, taking the annual rate to 3.5% from 4.2%. Core was unchanged on the month, its weakest reading of 2026, with annual core at 2.6% from 2.9%. The energy index did the work at −5.7%, gasoline at −9.7%, more than offsetting shelter and food. Shelter itself rose 0.1%, its smallest monthly gain since early 2021.

This is the print that removes the near-term Fed rate hike, which was the sharpest downside catalyst we were gated on, and it removes it without turning the liquidity valve positive. The disinflation reported is energy, and energy has already reversed since the month it measures: crude is up 9.44% on the week. Oxford Economics reads May as this year’s peak inflation and notes that June’s relief predates the oil rise now working through the pipeline. Fed hold odds for July 28 and 29 moved to roughly 86%, and Polymarket’s odds of any hike in 2026 fell from around 70% to 55%.

Warsh took the bullish mission-accomplished read and refused it in five words: “That is not my view.” Warsh did not soften. What softened was the bull case.

China missed for the first time since the pandemic. Second-quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew 4.3% against 4.5% expected and a 4.5%-to-5% target, with crude imports down 41.3% year-on-year to near decade lows and property investment down 18%. Analysts expect fiscal rather than monetary support at the late-July Politburo. The People’s Bank of China is the engine gold’s rally sits on, and a growth miss that points Beijing toward fiscal support keeps it pointed upwards for bullion, with little impact on bitcoin.

— Chief Macro Strategist (Theodore Brennan)

Geopolitical Tape

Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority declared Hormuz closed until further notice. US Central Command rejected the closure and escorted traffic down a contested southern corridor off Oman.

Some truth can be found in the transits. Observable crossings have fallen to roughly six vessels per twelve-hour window, against eighteen to twenty-two a day earlier this month. The Energy Department counted 8.5 million barrels through the strait on Sunday. It is still transited, barely, and on Iran’s terms.

Then Washington reimposed the naval blockade on Tuesday. That threat is the escalation that matters, because it widens the surface toward the Red Sea. One shut chokepoint is priced into crude. Two are not priced anywhere. The asymmetry underneath has not moved all month: closing a lane costs a drone, reopening it costs a navy.

— Geopolitical Intelligence Officer (Margaux Lindqvist)

Commodity Tape

WTI crude sits at $80.79, up 9.44% on the week, and it is now 13.34% above its 100-week moving average at $71.28. That line is rising, up 1.76% against where it stood thirteen weeks ago. Brent settled at $84.73 and is up 10% across two sessions. Western fuel markets flashed record tightness.

The tell is what crude did on Wednesday. June’s inflation print came in soft on every line, with the energy index down 5.7% and gasoline down 9.7%, and oil held its gains anyway. The war premium is carrying itself now rather than leaning on the inflation trade.

Nothing in the demand data supports the price. The International Energy Agency expects global oil demand to fall by roughly one million barrels a day in 2026, the first annual decline since 2020. China cut crude imports 41.3% year-on-year to near decade lows, on a quarter that missed its growth target. This is a naval blockade and four rounds of airstrikes setting a price, and the fundamentals underneath it are pointed the other way.

— Inflation & Real Asset Analyst (Sienna Whitfield)

Hard Assets

Any commodity price is two prices stacked on each other: a barrel measured in gold, and gold measured in dollars. New liquidity hits gold first and then works its way out into energy and crops, so the money half moves early and goes flat as the cycle rolls over, and the real half is what moves on the way down.

Gold pinned at $4,000 is the money half going quiet; oil climbing is the real half doing its job. We read the oil leg as a Hormuz war premium wearing capital flow’s clothes. Gold sits below its twenty-week average.

— Hard Asset Strategist (Marcus Vasquez)

Equity Tape

The SPY sits above all moving averages with all lines rising.

The banks underwrote it. Goldman printed $20.98 a share against $14.48 expected on revenue of $20.34 billion against $16.13 billion, and took the stock up 9%; JPMorgan posted its strongest profit ever; Bank of America and Wells Fargo both beat. Bank profits beating into a soft-landing read is the underwrite that keeps equities standing while the geopolitical surface widens.

It is not evenly held. IBM lost a quarter of its value in a session on a second-quarter profit warning. Monday took the KOSPI down 8% into a circuit breaker, with Samsung off 9% and SK Hynix off 13% as foreign and institutional investors sold a net ₩2.8 trillion, and the Nikkei fell 3% alongside. Semiconductors bounced back the next day, with the VanEck Semiconductor exchange-traded fund (ETF) up 2.5%, and SK Hynix had just raised $26.5 billion at $149 a share in the largest United States debut ever by a foreign company, more than seven times oversubscribed. A chip washout that gets absorbed in twenty-four hours is a rotation, not a market breaking.

This is characterization rather than a trigger, and a quiet reading is not an all-clear. The cracks we are spotting ain’t showing yet.

— Technical Analyst (Lukas Marchetti)

On-Chain Tape

Profit-taking has dried up, unrealized losses are shrinking, and supply keeps maturing into patient hands. But nobody has arrived to buy what they stop selling: spot Cumulative Volume Delta flipped from +$17.2 million to −$58.8 million, spot volume fell 21.5% to $4.1 billion, active addresses sit near their lower bound, and the fourteen-day Relative Strength Index ran to 66.9, overbought on volume that is not there.

— Capital Flow Analyst (Priya Sandoval) · Fundamental Research Analyst (Charlotte Donovan)

The Alt Tax

Hayloo’s Beta Desk

Beta is how much a coin moves when Bitcoin moves a dollar: above 1.00 it amplifies Bitcoin, below 1.00 it lags. The desk splits that into what a coin catches on Bitcoin’s up-days and what it gives back on the down-days, because most coins do not catch the two in equal measure. Give back more than you catch and you are paying the alt tax. This week two coins lead Bitcoin and two trail it, one regime changed hands, and all four series still catch more upside than they give back.

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XRP gave back the line it took four weeks ago

XRP’s 28-day run leading Bitcoin ended on July 13. Three days into Trailing against a 24.5-day median run, this one is young.

The directional split runs the other way from the blended number. XRP caught 119 cents of every dollar Bitcoin gained and gave back 81 on every dollar lost, 1.5× more upside than downside and the widest favorable gap on the desk at +0.39, stable rather than contracting. All three windows read Trailing, one small move from flipping back to outperforming bitcoin.

Solana — 850 days

Solana is 850 days into Outperform, 2.6× its own 331-day median and the longest current run on the desk by 630 days. Outperform is 88.0% of Solana’s recorded history across five runs, so length here is the base case rather than an anomaly.

SOL caught 121 cents of every up-dollar against 106 given back, 1.1× more upside than downside. The +0.14 gap has been favorable for 14 days and it is the narrowest edge of the three coins carrying one. The 30-day beta is 1.10, down from 1.32 on July 8 and still 0.21 above its Trailing line, while the 60-day at 1.28 and the 120-day at 1.21 have not followed it down.

All three windows read Outperform.

Ethereum crossed above Solana

Ethereum carries the desk’s highest 60-day beta at 1.31 against a 1.24 cut, with its 30-day at 1.32 and its 120-day at 1.26 agreeing. It has led Bitcoin for 15 days, and the gap to Solana has closed from roughly 0.4 in October to 0.03 now.

Of every dollar Bitcoin gained ETH caught 162 cents, against 127 given back on every dollar lost. That is 1.3× more upside than downside, and the +0.35 gap is widening rather than contracting. The caution is the run itself: Ethereum’s median Outperform run is 4.5 days across 24 runs, and this one is already 15 days old.

The altcoin basket

TOTAL3, the basket of altcoins excluding Bitcoin and Ethereum, has trailed Bitcoin for 220 straight days against a 51-day median and has not been above 1.00 since December. Trailing is where this basket lives, at 66.2% of its recorded history.

It caught 52 cents of every up-dollar and gave back 41, 1.3× more upside than downside, favorable for 31 straight days and stable. All three windows agree. At 0.55 the beta sits 0.33 above the Decoupled line with 0.41 still to go before Outperform.

Bitcoin dominance

Bitcoin dominance, Bitcoin’s share of total crypto market capitalisation, is 58.98% and rising. It sits above its 50-day average at 58.88% and below its 150-day at 59.40%. It peaked at 61.14% on May 5, bottomed at 57.94% on June 3, and has added 1.04 points off that low. Rising dominance means Bitcoin is taking share back.

Dominance and the basket agree this week. Bitcoin is gaining share and the basket is lagging Bitcoin at 0.55, both pointing the same way, so there is no divergence to flag. For the individual coins above, dominance is market backdrop only — it tracks the whole market rather than any one coin’s beta.

What’s solid, what’s soft

Solid. The 60-day symmetric betas are the tightest numbers here, with standard errors running 6.5% to 8.4% of estimate across the four series. The regime tags, the boundaries and the population shares come straight from each coin’s own clustering.

Soft. The directional betas are wider. Solana’s up-capture carries a standard error of 30% of its estimate, the widest on the desk; XRP’s and the basket’s run 19% and Ethereum’s 12.5%. Read the asymmetry gaps as direction of travel rather than precise quantities.

Softer. XRP’s Trailing regime is three days old and its beta is a hundredth from the line it crossed, so a read on it much past three weeks is on thin ice. Ethereum’s Outperform run is 15 days against a 4.5-day median. The tail regimes rest on one to three historical episodes per coin and Ethereum has none at all, so nothing the desk says about Decoupled or Extreme Outperform carries statistical weight.

The Beta Desk measures the Bitcoin relationship. It reports what the data shows and flags what is uncertain; it does not forecast direction, and nothing above is positioning.

Hayloo’s Perp Book

Size and direction. Hayloo’s book remains net short. Bitcoin: −201.586 coins, an entry-net of −$14,147,461 and −$13,065,366 at mark. Solana: −36,719.84 coins, −$2,306,000 entry-net and −$2,836,607 at mark.

Funding Rate Carry — income, and the governor is inert. The trailing four-week smoothed mean of daily carry reads +$1,297.28 a day, which annualizes to +$473,506 and 5.61% of equity.

Next levels that fire. Downside: $55,000 Bitcoin at −15.1% and $55 Solana, both Long Add and Short Take-Profit. Upside: $66,000 Bitcoin and $90 Solana.

Position vs. thesis. The book is positioned for taking profit on weakness, and building a long leg as bitcoin is looking to shape a bottom from a range.

— Lead Trader (Jordi Federer)

Forward Thesis

The read through summer stays choppy, slow and tardy. Liquidity crossed into contraction, which adds a second layer of price-headwind, landing in the third and fourth quarter. In between, the sellers are leaving and the buyers have not arrived, which is a range rather than a leg down. Expect Bitcoin to work between the Realized Price at $53,000 and the Short-Term Holder cost basis near $69,000, with the $66,000 max-pain pin the near-term magnet and $65,000 the level that has now rejected three times.

What would change our mind, each against its current value:

1. The Shadow Monetary Base three-month rate clearly positive and non-base-effect, with the twelve-month rate turning up at the same time. Now −1.3%, with the twelve-month at +0.2% and flat inside its own revision noise.

2. The Realized Profit/Loss Ratio sustained above 2.0 across multiple weeks, with confirmed accumulation. Now −0.5, with loss-taking still dominant. Far.

3. A weekly close above $69,000 with sustained spot demand. Spot Cumulative Volume Delta went the wrong way for this condition at −$58.8 million from +$17.2 million. Partial at best.

4. A sustained run of S&P 500 closes below its twenty-day line. Not close, and the short-horizon line has turned back up. This one fires toward escalation rather than toward relief.

Watchlist

• Bitcoin near $69,000 — the Short-Term Holder cost basis, 6.5% up. Re-marked down from $72,200 this week. The named next resistance, where the people most inclined to sell are the ones about to be made whole. A reclaim held with spot demand behind it is the on-chain thesis breaking; a rejection keeps the range.

• Bitcoin at $66,000 max pain and $65,000. The $65,000 line has rejected three times. Max pain is the near-term magnet and a level rather than a zone, so no action attaches to it.

• Howell’s Shadow Monetary Base, next print. −1.3% now. A second negative print says the contraction is not a one-week artifact; a return above zero says this one was. The twelve-month rate at +0.2% is the other half of the exit condition and sits inside its own revision noise.

• The Fed’s identity. A third consecutive week of Fed liquidity expansion against a still-draining engine is Capital Flow’s case surviving its own test. The engine turning up on it is the trip-wire.

• WTI against its rising 100-week moving average at $71.28. Crude is 13.34% above the line, the widest margin of the series, and it has held there for a week. A month above it is what turns this from a spike into a regime.

• Bab el-Mandeb. The Revolutionary Guard threatened to close all other export corridors. A second live chokepoint is not priced anywhere.

• Solana at $90, 16.5% up. The first level above the blended short. Sized against the error bar rather than the point estimate.

• Stablecoin supply. USDC at roughly $73 billion, down from $80 billion in March, inside a $10 billion contraction since May. This is the dry powder under the whole crypto complex, now being attacked at its economics rather than its size.

The Team

Jordi Federer — Lead Trader. Owns the book and the publication. Sizing, staging, and every decision that moves capital.

Theodore Brennan — Chief Macro Strategist. Central-bank reaction functions, the dollar, and the rate path.

Julian Harlow — Global Liquidity Director. The liquidity engine, the collateral multiplier, and the transmission lag into price.

Margaux Lindqvist — Geopolitical Intelligence Officer. State behavior, escalation mechanics, and the tails that reprice commodities.

Marcus Vasquez — Hard Asset Strategist. Gold, the debasement basket, and the hard-money ratios.

Sienna Whitfield — Inflation & Real Asset Analyst. Energy, the inflation impulse, and the real-asset complex.

Priya Sandoval — Capital Flow Analyst. Fund flows, positioning, derivatives, and where the marginal dollar comes from.

Charlotte Donovan — Fundamental Research Analyst. On-chain cohorts, cost bases, and the structural read beneath the tape.

Lukas Marchetti — Technical Analyst. Market structure, moving-average regimes, and the levels that fire.

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