Daily Update:

• Job openings for December in the U.S. fell to a 3-month low of 7.6M and slightly below economist expectations of 7.9M. Both the quits, hiring and layoffs rate have held steady at similar levels to November and October – this is evidence of the low hiring, low firing rhetoric many FOMC members including Chair Powell have highlighted. 
• Additionally, San Francisco President Mary Daly highlighted yesterday that the U.S. economy “came into 2025 in a very good place” and the Fed  does not need to act “preemptively” given policy uncertainty. 
• U.S. equities show signs of some investors ‘buying the dip’ as the fear of tariffs have been put on hold. The S&P 500 ended the day yesterday up 0.7% and the NDX rose 1.3%. Shares of Alphabet fell over 9% in after-hours trading yesterday as Google revenue numbers disappointed. 

• Bitcoin spent the day hovering between $96K and $100K as David Sacks, Crypto Czar gave updates on a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve during a press conference in Washington. Sacks mentioned the administration is “still waiting for some cabinet members who are on the working group to get confirmed”, “but that is one of the first things we’re going to look at”.

• ETH’s term structure has remained significantly inverted, with front-end volatility as high as 70%. BTC’s, in comparison, trades at a significant volatility discount across the term structure with a far flatter shape.
• However, short-tenor volatility smiles of both assets are skewed bearishly towards puts along with a slight let-off in the more bullish skews at longer-dated expirations.
• The short term bearishness in options data is echoed by a fall in the basis of futures above oth BTC and ETH spot prices (if not yet showing a switch to a negative basis), but funding rates for ETH show a far higher demand for short exposure than is suggested by BTC perpetual swap markets.

This Week’s Calendar:

Charts Of The Day: