Today’s edition is brought to you by Osprey BNB Chain Trust ($OBNB) – the first tradable ticker for a security providing exposure to $BNB on the US stock market!
👉 Learn more about $OBNB here!
GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that's more satisfying than beating your older sibling in an arm wrestle.
Here’s what we got for you today:
- ✍️ What to look out for this week
- ✍️ Why most traders fail with leverage
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Why Most Crypto Investors Pick Wrong (And How to Do It Right)
- 🍪 We have a new deadline for a whole cohort of crypto ETFs
Prices as of 2:00 PM ET. Click here for our Fear & Greed Index.
WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR THIS WEEK 📅
We have a week chock-full of potentially market-moving events, alongside one of the strongest guest lineups in The Milk Road Show’s history!
So get out your Sharpies and prepare to mark your calendars…
1/ Macro 📊
- February Retail Sales data - Monday - a temperature check on retail spending
- February Housing Starts data - Tuesday - are new houses starting to be built?
- Fed Interest Rate Decision - Wednesday - will we get a rate cut this month?
- Initial Jobless Claims data - Thursday - has the job market been growing or contracting?
- February Existing Home Sales data - Thursday - are existing homes continuing to sell?
None of this data is really expected to surprise anyone. The market is 99% sure we won’t be getting a rate cut. 👇
…so why’re we talking about this at all? ‘Cause after the Fed makes its rate cut decision, Fed Chair Jerome Powell will make a public statement, and take questions from the press.
And while all of this data will be looking at February, a lot has already happened in March.
Which means the markets will be going through J-Powell’s statements/responses with a fine-toothed comb in an attempt to tease out any changes to the Fed’s future plans.
(Do they think the economy is in trouble? Will they bring rate cuts forward? Have they changed their outlook?)
2/ Events 📆
Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) kicks off today (ending Friday), where they’re expected to debut their new AI chip ‘Blackwell Ultra’, and a new AI superchip ‘Vera Rubin’.
What does this have to do with crypto? Nothing directly – but Nvidia is essentially just a giant thermometer that measures the growth of the tech industry.
If the market likes what Nvidia puts down this week, it could help renew confidence across the tech industry (crypto included).
That said, crypto will still have a part to play at the conference.
Near Protocol’s co-founder, Illia Polosukhin, will be speaking on a panel hosted by Nvidia’s CEO (Jensen Huang) – so bullish crypto news could well be born from this!
3/ Podcasts 🎤
As far as guests are concerned, this might be the hardest hitting week in The Milk Road Show’s history…
- On Tuesday, we have Raj Gokal – co-founder of Solana
- On Wednesday, we have William Quigley – co-founder of Tether
- On Friday, we have Adeniyi Abiodun – co-founder of Mysten Labs (the company behind Sui)
If you’re not already – subscribe to The Milk Road Show and turn on notifications!
(You won’t want to miss these episodes.)
HOW TO ACCESS THE 5TH LARGEST CRYPTO ON TRADFI RAILS 🤝
Pop quiz: What’s the 5th largest crypto by market cap that no one’s talking about?
It’s $BNB baaaby!
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Problem is, accessing $BNB on TradFi rails can be tricky…
The Osprey BNB Chain Trust ($OBNB) offers the first US-tradable ticker for a security that provides exposure to $BNB, giving you secure exposure right from your brokerage account – making $OBNB one of the only paths for US investors to access $BNB exposure via $USD.
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WHY TAKING ON LEVERAGE IS A TERRIBLE IDEA FOR MOST TRADERS 👎
Don’t tell PETA, but over the weekend, Crypto Twitter went whale hunting…
Someone spotted a $376M Bitcoin short position, with 40x leverage!
The position was later increased to $380M, with a liquidation price of $86,593, as some deep-pocketed investors began trying to force a liquidation.
So far, it hasn’t worked – but the bigger question floating around our PRO Discord channel last night was: what the hell does any of this even mean? ☝️
It’s a fair question to ask (this is a dense topic) – so, we’re going to break it down as simply as we know how, until it all just *clicks*!
Alright, here goes:
Shorts are a leveraged bet that an asset will go down in price – ‘leveraged’ meaning you're only using some of your money and the rest is borrowed.
A short position comes with what's called a ‘liquidation level’ – which is a fancy term for:
“A price point at which you’ve lost the collateral you put down, and all that’s left is what you took out as a loan – so to stop you losing your lenders money, the trading platform closes the position and returns the loan automatically.”
(Doesn’t have the same ring to it as ‘liquidation level’ though.)
Now, @cbb0fe saw this short position and decided to rally some deep-pocketed individuals to buy $BTC in large enough amounts to push the price higher (~$86k), in an attempt to liquidate this person’s short position.
Why? ‘Cause when shorts get liquidated, it creates forced buying pressure.
And in this case, that buying pressure would have amounted to ~$370M!
(Which could have pushed prices even higher, leading @cbb0fe and the gang to profit even more.)
Unfortunately for them, they couldn’t float $BTC’s price up to that liquidation level:
Now, here’s the lesson to be learned…
This kind of thing happens constantly.
Every minute of every day, different entities will be trying to push crypto prices in one direction or another in an attempt to force sales or purchases that will lead to a profit.
The more leverage (loans) you take when trying to capitalize on these minute-to-minute changes, the smaller and smaller margin of error you have to play with.
(In this particular case – a 3% move in Bitcoin’s price would have lost this trader $9.5M of their own money!)
And if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s VERY easy to rack up losses, fast.
This is why we’re so staunch about not taking on leverage – it’s a high risk game, for giga-brained traders.
If you ain’t one of ‘em – you’re most likely going to get rekt.
Do you use leverage?
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
We're going to Consensus Toronto! Want to join us? Get 15% OFF your ticket with the code ‘MILKROAD’ and come hang at our meetup!
We are “one sizeable step closer to a Solana ETF”. ICYMI, the world’s largest futures exchange has now launched $SOL futures. Solana spot ETF, here we comeeee.
Binance is doing another marketing push. This time, it’s for their wallet where they’re offering zero-fee trading for the next 6 months.
We have a new deadline for a whole cohort of crypto ETFs. As expected, the SEC has delayed decisions for $XRP, $SOL, $LTC and $ADA ETFs.
Ethereum price prediction slashed from $10K to $4K. According to Standard Chartered, they expect the $ETH underperformance to continue. Let’s just hope they’re wrong. - DL News
Imagine getting 8% back on all your spendings. That’s exactly what Crypto.com is offering on their debit cards.**
*this is sponsored content.
**this is partner content.
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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.
