Bitcoin under $61K. The never-sell crowd still selling.

Stock Market Edge

A Trillion Dollars in Chips Did a Lap and Came Back Tired. The market coiled. The spring is labelled CPI.

Premarket snapshot:
Futures sat within a tenth of a percent of flat near 09:00 ET, the universal posture of a market that has decided to let someone else go first. Tuesday’s session closed lower on fresh Iran strike chatter. Friday’s 2.6% drop ended a nine-week win streak with no ceremony.

Sector rotation:
Semiconductors remain the mood ring. The PHLX index fell 10% Friday, roughly a trillion dollars, found dip buyers Monday, then handed it all back Tuesday. Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron led the round trip in both directions, impressively.

Earnings or guidance:
SailPoint fell 12% after posting a surprise loss of 13 cents where the street wanted a four-cent profit, though revenue rose 22% to $280 million. Apple’s developer conference, Tim Cook’s last as chief, promised a smarter Siri, eventually.

Cross-asset nuance:
The two-year yield at 4.15% is a market pricing tightening while everyone politely discusses easing. The VIX spiked over 20% Friday, then calmed below 19, as fear does when nothing has actually been resolved. Brent near $93 keeps energy underneath the whole session, the variable nobody can model and everybody can feel.

📊 There’s a level on SPX I’m watching closely this morning. My full analysis briefing has it – plus what happens if we hold it, and what happens if we don’t. [Read it here →]

Crypto Market Edge

The Company Famous for Never Selling Sold a Bit, Quietly. Bitcoin slips under $61K while the institutional bid finds the door.

Price snapshot:
Bitcoin traded near $61,300 early Wednesday, down about 3%, after a brief and unloved visit below $60,000 earlier in the week. Ethereum sat near $1,624, off 2 to 4%. The total market hovered at $2.11 trillion, dominance steady at 58%, a figure that flatters the majors only because the alts are doing worse.

Flows & positioning:
Spot Bitcoin ETFs shed another $77 million Tuesday, extending four-week outflows to $5.4 billion, one week of which set a $1.72 billion record. BlackRock’s IBIT did most of the leaving. Ether funds, not to be outdone, set their own outflow record.

Leadership & rotation:
Weakness was democratic. Solana, XRP near $1.12 and BNB near $588 all fell together. The Fear and Greed Index sits in extreme fear, the zone where capitulation and bargain occasionally share a postcode.

Catalysts & roadmap:
Strategy, the treasury built entirely on the promise of never selling, sold, then explained it was tax planning. Markets nodded politely and priced it as a signal anyway. Today’s CPI decides the next direction, for whoever is left.

TL;DR – The Bottom Line

• May CPI lands at 8:30, seen at 4.2%, the hottest since April 2023. Warsh was hired to cut. The data appears to have other plans, in writing.
• Two-year yields at 4.15%, hike odds past 70%, jobs that doubled consensus at 172,000. The economy refused to cool on schedule. Awkward for everyone involved.
• Chips lost a trillion Friday, found buyers Monday, lost them Tuesday. The S&P sits coiled near flat, waiting for one number to ruin or rescue the week.
• Bitcoin under $61K, ETFs down $5.4 billion in four weeks, and Strategy, the never-sell brand, sold. The believers are quietly checking the exits, one browser tab at a time.
• Brent near $93 after round-tripping $98 on a ceasefire that exists mainly in press releases. Hormuz stays shut. Energy keeps writing the whole inflation story underneath.

📌 Fun Fact

The “exhaustion bar” on this morning’s chart – whose name, as I noted, doesn’t really matter – sits inside a candlestick analysis tradition with a much longer history than most people realise.

Candlestick charting was developed in Japan in the early 1700s by Munehisa Homma, a rice merchant from Sakata who traded on the Dōjima Rice Exchange in Osaka – one of the earliest organised commodity markets in the world.

Homma reportedly amassed a fortune by analysing the open, high, low, and close of daily rice prices and noticed that the relationship between those four numbers contained reliable information about supply, demand, and the psychology of the other traders in the pit.

He recorded his observations in a treatise, Sakata’s Five Methods, which described patterns that today’s chartists would recognise as the building blocks of modern candle pattern analysis.

The Western world did not encounter candlestick analysis seriously until 1991, when Steve Nison published Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques. Nison’s book introduced the formal English-language names for the patterns – doji, hammer, shooting star, hanging man, evening star, exhaustion bar and many others.

Each is, in Homma’s terms, a slightly different shape of the same four-number relationship at a particular point in a price series.

The names matter less than the shape. The shape matters less than where it appears. And where it appears matters less than what gets traded at the level when it does. Munehisa Homma was, in this sense, two and a quarter centuries ahead of Twitter chartists arguing about whether Tuesday’s print was a hammer, an exhaustion bar, or a hanging man with bullish implications.

[Sources: Munehisa Homma, Sakata’s Five Methods (c.1755),
historical Japanese commodity trading literature;
Steve Nison, Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques
(New York Institute of Finance, 1991); public]