Capitalist
SAT JUL 18 · DERIBIT BLOCKS · $2.5B NOTIONAL · JUL 31 EXPIRY
TWO AND A HALF BILLION SAYS $72,000 — AND NOT ONE DOLLAR ABOVE IT.
Deribit put the positioning on the record. Twenty thousand contracts of the $70,000 call expiring July 31, bought against twenty thousand contracts of the $72,000 call sold at the same expiry. Forty thousand contracts, one bitcoin each, $2.5 billion notional. Jean-David Péquignot at Deribit confirms large blocks in topside call spreads this week. The Capitalist read is not that somebody is bullish. The Capitalist read is in the short leg. A bull call spread is a financed position: you sell away everything above $72,000 to pay down the cost of owning everything above $70,000. Institutions did not buy upside. They bought a defined slice of it and sold the tail to fund the entry. That is what conviction looks like when it has a risk committee. The expiry is the tell. July 31 settles two days after the July 29 FOMC decision, where fed funds futures put a hold at 3.5%-3.75% around 75-80%. The structure is a Fed-catalyst trade with the maximum loss written down in advance. Note what the position concedes. Spot is $64,000, up from under $58,000 earlier this month, and the strike says the ceiling is $72,000 inside two weeks. Meanwhile the Strait of Hormuz is disrupted, WTI and Brent have surged the most since March, and June's inflation relief is backward-looking. Size and strike precision say institutional. Capped upside says these are not people who need the hardest money to run unbounded this month. They need it to go up eight thousand dollars and stop. The cap is still twenty-one million.
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coindesk · omkar godbole · jul 18 2:15 pm et · deribit options flow
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