China's economic challenges intensified at the beginning of this week, with the CSI 1000 index experiencing a decline of over 15% in the past five days.

As highlighted in one of my recent letters, China's economy has been grappling with headwinds, which appear to have been exacerbated further last week when a Hong Kong court judge ordered the liquidation of the indebted real estate giant, Evergrande.

Despite the Chinese authorities implementing various fiscal measures to stimulate it seems in current terms that there are still broader indicators of pain in the Chinese economy.

What I’m paying attention to in regard to this is how the authorities will respond.

In the most recent intervention following Monday’s downturn, authorities have taken steps to implement more extensive trading restrictions:

It remains uncertain whether these new measures will avert the ‘looming’ crisis, or if China’s PBoC will be forced to adopt looser economic policies.

With the Fed still also yet to stop tightening measures the conundrum is: Who will blink first, China or the US?

Bitcoin Enters Accumulation Phase Post ETF

BTC’s price has been range-bound over the past week, trading between $42K and $43.5K as the excitement around the spot ETF approvals continued to cool down.

However, it's noteworthy that net daily inflows have remained positive for the last seven consecutive trading days, with BlackRock and Fidelity taking the lead.

Bitcoin ETFs in Top 10 for January

Fidelity and BlackRock’s ETFs secured positions in the top 10 ETFs measured by inflows during January. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) claimed the eighth spot with an estimated $2.6 billion in net flows, while Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin ETF (FBTC) secured the tenth place with $2.2 billion in net flows.

Not too shabby for ETFs that launched less than a month ago!

The Supply Shock Will Come…

While it is still too early to predict precisely when the institutional adoption of BTC will have a significant and long-term positive impact on the price, industry experts — the latest being ARK Invest — seem to agree that Bitcoin might be finally ripe for institutional adoption.

Here’s why:

  1. Bitcoin has outperformed every major asset over longer-term horizons

  2. Bitcoin’s correlation with traditional assets is low (0.27 over the past five years)

  3. Bitcoin could play a major role in maximizing risk-adjusted returns

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