Put On Your Crypto Winter Coats

Hello from Team Crypto at Bloomberg, and thank you for being one of the first people to subscribe to our newsletter. We're looking forward to your feedback (and best memes, if we're honest). For today's issue, international man of mystery and Senior Executive Editor for Markets Chris Nagi breaks down the big chill settling over  markets. You can sign up here

Happy sledding

An evocative, and currently trending, phrase in the already teeming vernacular surrounding Bitcoin longs is “crypto winter,” the recurrent situation in which doldrums set in for months after a major price slump and everyone must sit there wondering if the market will ever move again. The idea, new by historical standards, is — like everything else subject to the Twitter metabolism — rapidly being depleted of meaning through viral overuse by worried crypto brethren after a brutal few days of sharp selling.

Which doesn't make its etymology uninteresting. You can see why a term denoting "inexplicable grinding stasis" would be needed in a market where almost everyone is pretending to have a framework for fundamentals where there seemingly aren’t any. If you've tried, you know: There is no cohesive rationale to day-to-day moves in crypto — or no sure storyline, anyway. Humility, charts and liquidation data might be useful, and maybe a few economic principles apply longer term. But real-time analysis of why the numbers move is often backfitted guessing. A few catchphrases — “bear market,” “crypto winter,” “Fibonacci retracement” — never hurt anyone.

Speaking of other markets, it's interesting to note how one specific set of inputs, the price of stocks, has started to blot out the others when it comes to characterizing crypto swings. Sunday night was notable, when after a few days spent meandering queasily, a healthy 6 p.m. open of electronic futures on the S&P 500 and Nasdaq jacked Bitcoin prices up in a matter of seconds. Alas, it didn't last, but the correlation did make it seem like the narratives associated with the stock market are, in the aforementioned absence of anything else, becoming portable to the cryptosphere. Given where things stand in equities, crypto bulls might need a heavier coatChris Nagi

Charting it out

What we’re reading (and writing)

• Crypto Tax Loophole Offers Escape Hatch for Battered Investors
• The Rise of the Crypto Mayors (New York Times)
• Bitcoin’s Price Tumble Tests Resilience of Crypto Miners
• What Taleb Gets Wrong - and Right (Bloomberg Opinion)
• Ditch Bitcoin: IMF Urges El Salvador to Rethink Crypto

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