Traditional Markets

It was interesting to watch the awkward body language between Donald Trump and his French counterpart over the last three days. However, even though the pair now appears to be friends, it doesn't seem like much has been accomplished as far as any substantial policy change. At least, nothing that would improve the mood in the markets.

At the moment, the US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is on his way to China to see what he can do about avoiding an all-out trade war. This is typically something that the Secretary of State takes charge of, but with Rex Tillerson out of the picture, the Trump White House appears to be a bit understaffed.

One thing that seemed to cause some worry in the stock markets and may have been a catalyst for at least some of the selling was the Bond Yields, which spiked up early in the New York trading session.

Here we can see the US 10 Year Yield since the financial crisis. That 3% level has been a psychological pain point that has not been crossed since 2011.

Fed Research on Bitcoin

This research really speaks for itself but I did want to mention this outstanding report that was just published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

It gets a bit complicated but their general conclusion seems to be that Bitcoin is a very good middle ground between governments who have the obligation to control money flows as best they can and citizens who have the incentive for money to be more independent.

I must admit that it did take me a few minutes to wrap my head around this graph but once I did it really makes a lot of sense.

It's really incredible to see such outstandingly positive research coming from a central bank in the United States. This really fits into the narrative that I've personally been advocating for a while now, that Bitcoin should be an excellent compliment to the current global monetary system.

Ethereum Hacked

A few of Google's servers fell yesterday causing a disruption in Internet service in some parts of the world. 

This is not all that uncommon and the incident is still being investigated. The bigger issue is that it seems some hackers managed to exploit the downtime to hijack MyEtherWallet.com (MEW)

MEW is the main website that many crypto enthusiasts use to store their Ethereum and Ethereum based tokens, so this is kind of a big deal. Some people who tried to access the website at that time were redirected to a lookalike phishing site that then gathered their login information (private keys) and emptied their wallets.

Word quickly spread throughout the cryptowebs and a patch was quickly released. All in all, it seems that only 216 ETH was stolen.

This is a reminder that in these early days of crypto and blockchain we must remain alert. Always check the URL of the website you're visiting and if you do see any security warnings like the one below, please do not ignore them.

The crypto-market was in the thrall of a raging bull run but it does seem that the hack may have stopped it in its tracks. The initial reaction in Ethereum (yellow circle) was quite small... 

...but it does seem that this morning we're seeing a wider pullback across the board this morning. 

Over the next few hours, we should be able to get a good test of cryptotrader sentiment and see how dedicated they are to buying the dips.

Have an amazing day ahead!