For The Good

People who already have wealth have a clear advantage in increasing their wealth, while the worlds poorest often struggle to meet their basic needs and have very little chance to improve their situation.

Most of us are aware that the current economic engine isn't entirely efficient or fair, but it isn't often that we actually have a chance to do something about it.

People who already have wealth have a clear advantage in increasing their wealth, while the worlds poorest often struggle to meet their basic needs and have very little chance to improve their situation.

This graph from inequality.org maps out this trend since 1979...

Today's Highlights

  • Post Election
  • Fed Day
  • Alt Season is Upon Us

Today's Highlights

The post-election relief rally has carried over into the Asian session this morning and the European open is also slightly green. The US Dollar as well has bounced off its short-term lows.

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Meanwhile, bond yields continue to creep up quietly. Check the US 10 year yields again nearing their multi-year high.

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Remember, the sell-off in February was sparked by rising bond yields, so keep your eyes peeled.

Fed Day

Well... kind of. The US Federal Reserve has eight meetings throughout the year. Former Chairman Ben Bernanke back in the days when mass easing was necessary, instated the policy that some of those meetings would not be accompanied by a press conference.

The new Chairman Jerome Powell has ended that policy, and today will be the last Fed meeting that won't have a press conference. This is probably a good thing, as interest rates aren't expected to rise again until next month.

Remember, the sell-off in October was largely attributed to Fed Tightening. So it pays to pay attention. The FOMC statement is due at 14:00 EST in Washington DC. Around lunchtime on Wall Street.

 Green Light for Cryptos

Past performance is not an indication of future results but at least according to technical analysis, everything seems in place for an end of year rally in the crypto markets.

This article on Bloomberg shows a chart of the famous MACD indicator applied to a crypto index and highlights the positive divergence in the market.

A more basic technical analysis on Bitcoin also shows that the triangle that's been forming since the beginning of the year has now been broken. It's not the strong breakout we were hoping for. In fact, it's more of a flat unenthusiastic breakout but it is clearly to the upside.

We're keeping our eyes on the 200 DMA (blue line), which would need to be broken in order to confirm the bear market is over.

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The fundamentals, on the other hand, are fantastic. Bitcoin's TPS rate continues to grow, mining power has surged in the last few months, and scaling solutions like SegWit and Lightening are seeing increased effectiveness. 

Alt Season?

Of course, Bitcoin is the leader of the crypto markets and all coins look to it for guidance, but we've seen in the past how the alt-coins can lead as well sometimes, which is kind of what we're seeing now. 

The action started with BCH and soon spread to XRP. Now alternative investors are asking...

This article focuses on a service called Oracle which will allow programmers to incorporate real-world data into their smart contracts. We're also getting word right now about a new scaling solution for Ethereum known as plasma. This article from this morning has the details.

TL;DR: Plasma is like a Lightening network for Ethereum. 

So, Ethereum's looking pretty hot at the moment. It's been one of the most beaten down cryptos over the last few months and as we can see, it's now trading way below its 200 DMA.

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