Ripple, Steller Lumen Moving In Lock-Step

Traditional Markets

Investors who bought yesterday's lows were rewarded. Fears about a trade war and monetary tightening seem to have dissipated and low equity prices were too good to pass up.

After a 1%+ day on Wall Street, Asia has carried the momentum this morning and Europe has opened strong. As you can see, nearly half of the slide from the last few sessions has been recovered.

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DJ30 Chart

Things may have been eased by President Trump's admission that he is willing to negotiate with Mexico and Canada regarding the proposed tariffs IF a new NAFTA deal is signed. Of course, we all know how Trump feels about NAFTA.

He also seems to have changed his stance on the issue of trade wars. On Friday he tweeted that...

Donald J Trump Tweet

At a press conference yesterday, though he took a very tough stance on trade he did say that he doesn't think we'll have a trade war. 

The Results are In

Provisional Result

As everyone expected, the Italian elections have produced a real quagmire with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement getting enough of the vote to do exactly what they wanted. Which is to block a middle of the road coalition.

At this point, virtually every other party would need to gang up against them in order to form a government. Either that or we see a new election but even then it's not clear what good that would do.

Party

Also as expected, the euro doesn't seem to have moved much. Here we can see the EUR/USD hovering near the middle of the range that it's been forming since Mid-January.

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EUR/USD Chart

XRP Deals

Despite what we're used to from other markets, I'd like to point out that the crypto-market generally has less responsiveness to "breaking news" than say stocks for example.

These assets are extremely volatile and as such are subject to change in sentiment but it seems that the sentiment is decided on an industry-wide basis rather than on specific coins.

This can be seen rather sharply in the following graph, which shows the prices of both Ripple's XRP tokens and Steller Lumen's XLM.

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XRP Chart

As you can see, the rises and falls, peaks and troughs are moving in lock-step. Perhaps this is due to the fact that both coins, even though they are in direct competition, are intended for the same purpose.

The good news is that within the crypto industry there does seem to be differences between the different types of coins. As we can see below, even though under extreme pressure they tend to move together, given some market calmness they do tend to do their own thing.

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XRP Chart 2