Traditional Markets

Today was expected to be a rather quiet day in the markets yet somehow the Asian session managed to descend into chaos. The China50 index dropped 1.5% (left) to the bottom of the range (right) that’s been building up for months. 

Thankfully, the European session is holding up well with most major indices up more than 0.3%.

Brexit Bull Trap

The Pound Sterling got excited yesterday as it was announced that…

Here we can see the wild surge in the GBP at the time of the announcement (purple circle), but today the tough reality ahead seems to be setting into prices.

Zooming out on the chart, we can see that the Sterling is not having the best year but it does seem like it’s somehow hanging in there. The key level of 1.2750 has proved historically significant since the referendum and does seem to be holding for now.

Fight the FUD

Those of you who are active on crypto social media may have run across these images of scrapped mining rigs…

It seemed a bit strange to me so I wanted to investigate a bit more thoroughly before commenting. 

The first theory I heard was that these are recycled images from a flood that happened a few months ago. However, once I dug up that story it became clear that though they may seem similar, the rigs above are distinctly different from the ones that were lost in Sichuan Province in the July flood.

Not only that, the original poster above seems adamant that the images are fresh and relevant. Saying that it was posted in a Chinese mining WeChat group.

It all started to make sense when I found this video interview with a Chinese mining-rig supplier, who played down the recent images as FUD saying that this is standard operating procedure when you have ASICs that are no longer cost-effective.

In any case, with the declining prices lately, it’s not surprising that some miners are going out of business. The issue here though is that many people in the industry are new and don’t fully understand how these things work.