Cryptocurrencies extend rally while stocks falter

Bitcoin and ether continued their historic price run Monday while equities posted a mild correction ahead of next week’s interest rate decision. 

Bitcoin broke yet another record Monday afternoon in New York, hitting a price of $72,846.65, according to Coinbase. The largest cryptocurrency is up close to 5% today and more than 8% over the past week. 

Bitcoin ( BTC ), which lost 11% last week after clocking an all-time high, managed to hold steady Monday, trading just under $72,300 at time of publication, per Coinbase. 

Bitcoin’s rally has spurred a number of liquidations in the derivatives market that exacerbated the volatility, analysts from Kaiko said in a Monday note. Bitcoin perpetual futures open interest hit a multi-year high last week of $15 billion while market depth surpassed $600 million, according to Kaiko. 

“However, looking at the breakdown between bid and ask depth, we observe a strong mismatch,” Kaiko analysts wrote. “The quantity of asks far surpasses bids within 2% of the mid price for the longest period since early 2021. This suggests that traders have been taking profit as BTC hits new highs.”

Ether ( ETH ) was also on the rise Monday, rallying 4% over 24 hours to trade around $4,000. While bitcoin has been breaking records in recent days, ether has yet to post a new all-time high. Its last record price of $4,721 was set in 2021. 

The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee convenes next week for their policy-setting meeting. Markets overwhelmingly expect central bankers to hold interest rates, according to data from CME Group. 

Stocks pared gains from last week, with the SP 500 and Nasdaq Composite indexes closing Monday’s session 0.1% and 0.4% lower, respectively. 

Investors are still parsing through the “mixed bag” jobs report released on Friday, which showed the US economy added 275,000 jobs in February, more than the 200,000 new positions expected, Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research said. 

“Since unemployment is exceptionally low, it makes it harder to know whether rising joblessness is truly worrisome or simply the return to a more-sustainable long run average,” Colas said. “This is a potential problem for the Fed ’s ability to read the US labor market/economy, and Chair Powell has discussed it at past post-FOMC press conferences.”