🥛 The S&P 500 of crypto 📊

GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that helps you keep the title of ‘crypto big brain’ amongst your friends.

Here’s what we got for you today:

✍️ The S&P 500 of crypto
✍️ BNB breaks the top 3
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Why the Debasement Trade Could Spark the Biggest Bitcoin Bull Run in History w/ James Lavish
🍪 More bad jobs data (is this a problem?)

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Prices as of 2:00 PM ET, provided by CoinGecko.

THE S&P 500 OF CRYPTO 📊

On the surface, Standard & Poor's ‘S&P 500’ index is just a curated list of the top 500 public US companies.

…but in reality, it’s the cornerstone of the global stock market.

‘Cause the majority of the investing world (whether individual or institutional) will allocate to any companies added to that list.

Hell – most large institutional funds (think pension funds, hedge funds – even sovereign wealth funds) are mandated to hold a certain amount of S&P companies.

Why? ‘Cause investing into the names on that list = reliable/historically safe exposure to the companies driving the world’s largest economy.

And these mandated allocations tend to result in fresh/consistent buy-pressure for companies that get added to the index (helping to push the price of new entrants up).

This is known as ‘the index effect’ – which, yeah, doesn’t affect all new entrants in equal measure…but when it works, it works.

Here’s an example of ‘the index effect’ doing its thing in recent years:

Block: +7-10% after inclusion announcement
Tesla: +60% from announcement to actual inclusion in 2020
Palantir: +23% in 10 trading days, from announcement to inclusion 👇

Source: Tastylive

And now, Standard & Poor’s (aka: one of the world’s most trusted financial information companies) is creating ‘The S&P 500 of crypto’ – called the Digital Markets 50.

(DM50, if ya nasty.) 👇

Source: @chevycassar

Now, the tokens/companies to be featured on this list are yet to be named – the announcement is slated for the end of the year…

And honestly, this particular index may not end up being the ‘index of choice’ for institutions looking to track the crypto sector – BUT!

If anyone is well positioned to take that spot, it’s Standard & Poor’s – so:

Watch this space
Pray to the crypto gods that your bags get indexed

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WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH $BNB? 📈

We just checked our blindspots, and found Binance’s $BNB token staring back at us:

Source: @MilkRoadDaily

And the more we dig into the charts, the more we realize that this isn’t one of those things we can explain away by saying:

“This is just near-term outperformance. Hard to spot, easy to miss.”

‘Cause $BNB has been outperforming Ethereum and Solana for most of this year. 👇

Source: TradingView

…and it gets even more brutal when you look at the one month chart.

Source: TradingView

Now, this might sound weird, but having this blindspot is ok with us.

We’re all about placing bets on fundamentally strong projects that we both understand and actively use (which means we have to make peace with missing some heaters).

And while $BNB isn’t in our wheel house – we wanted to dig into the factors driving its climb into the top 3 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

Short answer: it’s all about the network effects baaaby!

Long answer…

You know how Coinbase has a slew of centralized and decentralized products that allow them to own a large portion of the user experience across the crypto spectrum?

Yeah, well – Coinbase is mainly focused on the North American market. The rest of the world is largely owned by Binance.

The latest hit offering helping to float $BNB’s price has been Aster, the BNB-based perp dex (aka: an exchange where you can trade with leverage). 👇

Source: @NekozTek

One of the many benefits of being part of the broader Binance network?

If a BNB-based token does well on decentralized markets, it’s often added to Binance’s centralized exchange, helping to push prices even higher.

Plus – Binance buys n’ burns around $1B worth of $BNB tokens every single quarter.

So here’s the over-simplified math on what’s driving $BNB’s price:

Exposure to a massive global user base + integration across multiple centralized/decentralized products & exchanges + insane buybacks/burns =

Number go up.

PRO ALL ACCESS PORTFOLIO UPDATES 📊

Wanna know how our PRO team’s bags are shaping up in the current market?

Check out Milk Road PRO All Access Portfolio. 🤝

It’s an active feed of our holdings, percentage allocations, and average entry prices — with real-time buy/sell/swap alerts that go out via our Discord.

Disclosure: We are not a day trading portfolio so don’t expect a high volume of trades. Read our “How To Build a Crypto Portfolio” report to learn more about our portfolio strategy.

The Milk Road PRO All Access Portfolio is exclusive to PRO All Access members.

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