Alright, the apes have it! Let's discuss the mythical "alt season" which people seem to get obsessed about every time BTC moves by itself.

I call it "mythical" BTW not because it's never happened -- but because, as I see it, there's no *real* reason to expect it to happen now.
Alright, that started a little inflammatory, so let me clarify. When I hear people talk about "alt season," it tends to mean like, a period when alts rally a ton, especially vs. BTC, and it doesn't really matter what a coin is -- they all just go up.
The reasons I think this is not guaranteed start with BTC, so let's take a look at what's happened with BTC lately. And that is quite a lot! In the past week or so, BTC has continued its mega-rally that started around Thanksgiving with all the news of U.S. institutional buy-in.
What's driven it lately? Eh, kinda same thing -- more U.S. traditional funds adding BTC to balance sheet, Grayscale/Bitwise AUMs rising steadily, and exchanges like Coinbase are steadily increasing their daily volume (and valuations :P).
(Speaking of Coinbase -- I've seen a lot of chatter about people withdrawing BTC from exchanges like it, indicating HODLing. And ... maybe, but mayne not. Maybe they're gonna sell soon, or even collateralize more buys with it! We don't know yet.)
But that organic buying has been into "holiday liquidity" -- with some of the market gone, there are fewer offers to trade against. And that means liquidations have a way higher impact! Which has driven a lot of it. New ATHs also tend to have lower liquidity, too (no old orders).
So, those two effects -- one organic, one inorganic -- drove BTC up to close to 30k. Which brings us to today! What allowed BTC to get through 30k so fast when it took like 40 tries for it to break 20k?
My take: there was no "narrative" around breaking 30k. For 20k, it was the previous ATH which BTC failed to break and then crashed HARD. Lots of people wanted it above 20k ... but many others really thought it was a great sale. Which we saw, like, 40 times!
But 30k? Yeah, some sellers, for sure -- but nothing near as "organized" and nothing with as much history as the one-time ATH. So, the liquidations were enough to blow right on through! And, you guessed it, more liquidations kept driving the prices up and up.
(No need to go into that, I guess -- a TON of positions on all the derivatives platforms got liquidated during this rally into holiday/ATH low liquidity, which drove it up a good deal more than the organic buyers did -- but the spot buyers did matter! As we'll see.)
Alright, next ... BTC immediately crashed 10% WTF? This one was kiiinda because of derivatives and liquidations again -- a TON of OI was aggressively opened during this period, perp funding was paying 50bp/day to shorts are various points! And a small drawdown triggered more.
But the drawdown was actually mostly on spot exchanges, as it turns out. And during the BIG rally? Some liquidations, yes, but check out this chart of the BitMEX BTC perp premium (to spot) and OI during the period when BTC fell 10%:
Again, some liquidations; but a lot of the OI change was just a real seller, because the premium to spot got HIGH! Spot was the bigger factor here, and a lot of selling was taking place on those markets, with less leverage. Which made selling this perp ... appealing to Alameda ;)
But it signals that, yet again, the spot markets actually *were* important here. This time for some reversion -- it demonstrates that the "organic" buyers thought it was too high! Just as you might expect for a market move dominated by organic AND inorganic buying.
So! does that mean the U.S. customers have "called the top"? Well, some, but there are many players here. It does seem to signify a continued importance for the U.S. institutions, though -- and it'll be important to watch to see how that plays out.
OK, cool, altcoins! In my view, because this market narrative is so strongly about the U.S. institutions and what they're buying ... if any altcoins are gonna go up *if that narrative keeps up*, it should be the ones which the U.S. is "alright" with. Which are those?
ETH seems a good candidate -- it's got CME futures coming up, it's in a few other U.S. funds, and it's seen as sort of similar to BTC in important ways. And it's done OK (lol, compared to BTC) during the past week or so, as well as today, reaching its own (local) high.
Same with other coins which the U.S. seems alright with -- coins like LTC, BCH, and some other bigger ones. They've done fine in this paradigm, and *if the paradigm( keeps up I expect them to continue.
In the other corner we have noted ugly step-sister XRP. Not much has changed since my incredible Christmas Eve poem, as it's kept under-performing -- it kinda hilariously barely even moved today. Same for some others with bad press like ZEC.

And this is just what I expect -- if this paradigm keeps up, some coins will do well -- the ones the U.S. (or maybe another jurisdiction as things evolve) likes, and others will flounder. And if it doesn't ... why would we expect ANY specific net buying?
So my issue isn't with the idea that *specific* coins might go up -- and anything can of course happen! With so much altcoin leverage small moves can become big ones, and maybe the market will decide XRP is over-impacted -- it could certainly be by now!
... the issue is with the *expectation* that BTC up -> alts up, which it's just not that simple anymore. Alts that are fundamentally "different" from BTC in important ways won't necessarily follow it, and U.S. regulatory opinions are ... now an important way.
So, it seems like the most important thing moving forward is to watch out for signs this paradigm is over or not, and make the bets that that implies. Also, even if it's not over, maybe some coins are too impacted because of liquidations! That's something to watch, too.
It's been a pretty exhausting, wild ride lately, but one which has been super interesting and fulfilling -- and not a bad way to spend the holidays at all.
Also, I'll throw the DOGE a bone here: doesn't whatever the fuck DOGE did today mean any random alts should just be rallying? Isn't DOGE like, THE random alt? Surely if it's doubling everything oughta be.
Well, yes and no. Yes, it's obviously like, the prototypical dumb shitcoin. Or maybe it ... was? It's actually gained some U.S. credibility, being popular on Robinhood, and there's certainly a notable American who's a fan ;) @elonmusk
So I actually kinda think this is just another example of a U.S.-friendly alt rallying, except a) it has a TON of liquidations because of high leverage in places like Binance and b) lol it's DOGE of course it's gonna double if it goes up at all. Weird!

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More from @AlamedaTrabucco

24 Dec 20
'Twas the night before Christmas, and try though they may
Not a token was mooning, not even AAVE
Market buys getting sent by the apes without care
In hopes that new all-time highs soon would be there
Our traders were summoned post-haste from their beds
While visions of making bank danced in their heads
SBF in his sweatshirt, and I in my tee
Had just downed something we're gonna label "coffee"
And amongst all the chaos, amongst disarray
Amongst the red numbers borne out of the fray
From all of the carnage arose one big loser
A coin with a regulatory accuser
Read 19 tweets
18 Dec 20
Many close calls later, BTC finally managed to break through $20k -- and it BLEW through it, barely slowing down til $22k. What was different this time?

A thread about man vs. machine.

As has been pointed out, I've been adamant that the rallies in the past month or so have been heavily fueled by rampant liquidations on both BitMEX and Binance. And they have! But they were also fueled by organic buying among U.S. investors, as has been a popular narrative.
If anything, the narratives surrounding various U.S. funds and other companies buying BTC have gotten *stronger* in the past week or two than they were around Thanksgiving. More and more funds have announced their crypto holdings or plans to acquire them.
Read 31 tweets
12 Dec 20
Yeah, among other problems with this analysis, it also just TOTALLY ignores the main reason that a company like Alameda (which does trades from all of these buckets all day every day) might have for trading net in one direction in a day on one market:
... and that reason is: it's out of line with some other market(s)! For instance, let's just take today: I just checked, and it looks like in the 12 hours I've been trading today, Alameda has net bought 100 BTC or so on the OKEx BTC/USDT market.
Why is this? Well, during this time, we were also fairly flat BTC deltas (as we quite often are), so the reason *surely* was not, as this report might have you claim, that we were net buying BTC today!
Read 13 tweets
30 Nov 20
I do wish I had something more "different" to say than: buying kept up into liquidations which dried up around 19900, people sold and the new levered longs got liquidated down to here. But that's pretty much the whole story so far today! Image
It is worth noting that if you noticed the liquidations dried up -- which was pretty possible -- selling was a great trade, because of how much of the pop was due SOLELY to those liquidations. There were a LOT, organic buying did not explain TOO much of this rally.
(At least from 19300 or so on to 19900, anyway -- there was plenty of organic buying before that, but by 19300 it was mostly liquidations.)
Read 6 tweets
26 Nov 20
What happened on Thanksgiving 2020?

(Alameda edition -- a thread about maximizing)

I'm sure it's no surprise that the threads I post here are "delayed" a bit -- the sorts of insights I'm sharing tend to be about what *happened*, but at Alameda we're trying to figure out what is *about to* happen. How did we do that today?
This tweet *sort of* describes Alameda's game plan headed into the day. We thought it was probably more likely to keep going down just based on Thanksgiving = no U.S. people to buy again -- but mostly? We expected momentum.

Read 26 tweets
26 Nov 20
What happened on Thanksgiving 2020?

(Market color edition -- a thread about why liquidity matters)
I'd describe the past few week as *dense*. A ton has happened -- the market's paradigm has shifted seemingly a dozen times, and the sorts of moves we've seen would be seen as wild if they happened in a *year* in other markets.
Often, periods like this feel like they're building to something -- it's intangible, but there's often a ton of volatility and then BOOM, something giant happens. The vol doesn't always subside (and once Thanksgiving is over I expect more action). But right now? Calmer.
Read 23 tweets

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