WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR THIS WEEK 📅

We have a week chock-full of potentially market-moving events, alongside one of the strongest guest lineups in The Milk Road Show’s history!

So get out your Sharpies and prepare to mark your calendars…

1/ Macro 📊

• February Retail Sales data - Monday - a temperature check on retail spending

• February Housing Starts data - Tuesday - are new houses starting to be built?

• Fed Interest Rate Decision - Wednesday - will we get a rate cut this month?

• Initial Jobless Claims data - Thursday - has the job market been growing or contracting?

• February Existing Home Sales data - Thursday - are existing homes continuing to sell?

None of this data is really expected to surprise anyone. The market is 99% sure we won’t be getting a rate cut. 👇

…so why’re we talking about this at all? ‘Cause after the Fed makes its rate cut decision, Fed Chair Jerome Powell will make a public statement, and take questions from the press.

And while all of this data will be looking at February, a lot has already happened in March.

Which means the markets will be going through J-Powell’s statements/responses with a fine-toothed comb in an attempt to tease out any changes to the Fed’s future plans.

(Do they think the economy is in trouble? Will they bring rate cuts forward? Have they changed their outlook?)

2/ Events 📆

Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) kicks off today (ending Friday), where they’re expected to debut their new AI chip ‘Blackwell Ultra’, and a new AI superchip ‘Vera Rubin’.

What does this have to do with crypto? Nothing directly – but Nvidia is essentially just a giant thermometer that measures the growth of the tech industry.

If the market likes what Nvidia puts down this week, it could help renew confidence across the tech industry (crypto included).

That said, crypto will still have a part to play at the conference. 

Near Protocol’s co-founder, Illia Polosukhin, will be speaking on a panel hosted by Nvidia’s CEO (Jensen Huang) – so bullish crypto news could well be born from this!

3/ Podcasts 🎤

As far as guests are concerned, this might be the hardest hitting week in The Milk Road Show’s history…

• On Tuesday, we have Raj Gokal – co-founder of Solana

• On Wednesday, we have William Quigley – co-founder of Tether

• On Friday, we have Adeniyi Abiodun – co-founder of Mysten Labs (the company behind Sui)

If you’re not already – subscribe to The Milk Road Show and turn on notifications!

(You won’t want to miss these episodes.)

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WHY TAKING ON LEVERAGE IS A TERRIBLE IDEA FOR MOST TRADERS 👎

Don’t tell PETA, but over the weekend, Crypto Twitter went whale hunting…

Someone spotted a $376M Bitcoin short position, with 40x leverage!

The position was later increased to $380M, with a liquidation price of $86,593, as some deep-pocketed investors began trying to force a liquidation.

So far, it hasn’t worked – but the bigger question floating around our PRO Discord channel last night was: what the hell does any of this even mean? ☝️

It’s a fair question to ask (this is a dense topic) – so, we’re going to break it down as simply as we know how, until it all just *clicks*!

Alright, here goes:

Shorts are a leveraged bet that an asset will go down in price – ‘leveraged’ meaning you're only using some of your money and the rest is borrowed.

A short position comes with what's called a ‘liquidation level’ – which is a fancy term for: 

“A price point at which you’ve lost the collateral you put down, and all that’s left is what you took out as a loan – so to stop you losing your lenders money, the trading platform closes the position and returns the loan automatically.”

(Doesn’t have the same ring to it as ‘liquidation level’ though.)

Now, @cbb0fe saw this short position and decided to rally some deep-pocketed individuals to buy $BTC in large enough amounts to push the price higher (~$86k), in an attempt to liquidate this person’s short position.

Why? ‘Cause when shorts get liquidated, it creates forced buying pressure.

And in this case, that buying pressure would have amounted to ~$370M! 

(Which could have pushed prices even higher, leading @cbb0fe and the gang to profit even more.)

Unfortunately for them, they couldn’t float $BTC’s price up to that liquidation level:

Now, here’s the lesson to be learned…

This kind of thing happens constantly. 

Every minute of every day, different entities will be trying to push crypto prices in one direction or another in an attempt to force sales or purchases that will lead to a profit.

The more leverage (loans) you take when trying to capitalize on these minute-to-minute changes, the smaller and smaller margin of error you have to play with.

(In this particular case – a 3% move in Bitcoin’s price would have lost this trader $9.5M of their own money!)

And if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s VERY easy to rack up losses, fast.

This is why we’re so staunch about not taking on leverage – it’s a high risk game, for giga-brained traders.

If you ain’t one of ‘em – you’re most likely going to get rekt.