Today’s Highlights

• Fed Rate Cut
• Light Fungibility
• Crypto Conditions

Please note: All data, figures, and graphs are valid as of October 30th. All trading carries risk. Only risk capital you can afford to lose.

Traditional Markets

Today the United States federal reserve seems set to cut their interest rates for the third time this year.

With the US stock markets near all-time highs, unemployment near all-time lows, and inflation more or less stable it’s difficult to see why the Fed would need to be cutting rates so rapidly. Nevertheless, the markets fully expect them to do it and it seems the cut is already priced in.

Investors will also want to hear about the Fed’s operations in the repo market. At present, they’re injecting $75 billion per day into these short term markets, which is supposed to expire on November 4th.

The ‘silent QE program’ (yes, that’s what I choose to call it because they refuse to call it QE and have gone to great lengths to not call attention to this operation), which is supposed to print $60 billion per month until Q3 2020 is less of a focus but may catch some attention as well.

Out of the many companies that will report their earnings today, the highlights are Facebook and Apple.

For all our clients and colleagues in the UK, it seems we finally have a date for your general election. December 12th. Certainly much later than the Prime Minister was hoping but still enough for him to have a cabinet together by New Year’s break if he hustles.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Brexmas.

Light Privacy

Once again, I’d like to thank the great folks at the Litecoin Foundation for inviting me out and being so hospitable. For those of you who’d like to watch the keynote, just click here.

It was great to see the LTC community, or LitecoinFam as they’re often called, but even more I was excited to glimpse the future road map for the original altcoin.

After admitting in August that development has been slow due to a lack of programmers, in the last few days founder Charlie Lee has shown us that he’s serious about bringing privacy to Litecoin. Yesterday, he announced a new lead developer who will implement the mimblewimble privacy protocol on the LTC blockchain.

To be clear, as far as Lee is concerned, the new update is less about concealing transactions and more about the fungibility of the network. One of the main properties of money is that it’s fungible. One Dollar can be exchanged for any other Dollar because they’re all identical. Short of that, you get a chaotic system where some Dollars are worth more than others.

It seems the Bitcoin community is also eager to implement further privacy in BTC and as we’ve seen many times in the past Litecoin has a tendency to pave the way with these types of developments.

Crypto Conditions

Seems my flight is about to board but I did want to report that as it stands crypto markets are looking healthy. Volumes have returned to a normal level, as has sentiment while bitcoin tests support at $9000. A psychological level that somehow seems more significant than $10,000 lately.

(Click on image to enlarge)