The week turned on Wednesday morning. At 8:30 a.m. ET on October 14 the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported September consumer prices up 0.6 percent on the month and 3.7 percent on the year, against 3.4 percent in August and a 3.6 percent consensus. Energy did most of it: gasoline rose 9.1 percent in one month and 34.2 percent over the year. Core was tamer, 0.3 percent monthly and 2.6 percent annually.

What followed was not the usual hot inflation trade. QQQ lost 5.52 percent on the week while Treasury yields fell, the 10 year dropping 15 basis points. Bitcoin, normally the first risk asset sold on a hawkish print, gave up 2.00 percent, a little over a third of the Nasdaq proxy's loss. The driver was not inflation hedging but an AI and semiconductor complex that had wobbled for days and broke once the CPI gave it a reason.

Markets

Weekly figures are Kraken daily candles, October 12 to 18 UTC.

AssetOpenCloseHighLowChange
BTC$83,675.60$82,001.70$84,250.00$79,709.00-2.00%
ETH$2,534.35$2,407.51$2,576.94$2,313.42-5.00%
SOL$111.23$104.02$113.27$100.34-6.48%

Bitcoin's low came the day after the print, $79,709 on Thursday October 15; Unchained reported the CPI number pushed it toward $80,500 that session. Ether and solana took the worse end, down 5.00 and 6.48 percent.

Flows were negative but not panicked. US spot bitcoin ETFs shed a net $228.6 million over the week ended October 16 according to SoSoValue, well short of the $681 million that left the week before. IBIT took about $165 million of that and FBTC roughly $60 million, per Crypto Briefing.

Sentiment slid without breaking. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index opened at 69, its high, and ended Sunday at 53, its low, tied with Thursday. Those two Neutral readings were the first after a week and a half of straight Greed prints, and a week that took bitcoin below $80,000 never printed Fear.

Equities carried the real loss. SPY closed Friday October 16 at $763.25 against $778.57 the prior Friday, down 1.97 percent; QQQ closed at $709.80 against $751.27, down 5.52 percent. CNBC reported mid-week that the 20 most valuable global AI and semiconductor stocks had shed more than $1 trillion, with worries over the debt financing behind AI buildouts compounding the inflation data.

The bond market read the same week and bought. US cash markets were shut Monday for Columbus Day, so the comparison runs October 13 to 16 against the prior Friday. On the Treasury par yield curve the 10 year finished at 5.09 percent against 5.24 percent. The 2 year fell 6 basis points to 4.74 percent and the 30 year 17 to 5.43 percent, flattening the 2s10s spread from 44 to 35 basis points. A hot CPI that sends long yields down 15 basis points is a market pricing growth risk, not price risk. The inflation input kept climbing: front-month Brent closed Friday at $109.86, its highest since May 19, per Unchained.

Positioning

Hyperliquid open interest totalled $10.96 billion across 178 markets at the time of writing, down 1.4 percent on the day. Bitcoin was the largest book at $3.25 billion, or 39,547 BTC, and the one being cut: open interest fell 4.96 percent over 24 hours even as the price rose 1.19 percent, which reads as positions closing rather than a directional bet. Ether went the other way at $2.59 billion, or 1,081,357 ETH, up 2.97 percent. HYPE held third at $1.58 billion, SOL fourth at $574 million. Funding on the majors was mildly positive; the venue keeps about a day of history, so there is no weekly comparison.

The ETH/BTC ratio closed the week at 0.02936 on Kraken prices and sat at 0.029172 at the time of writing, down 4.78 percent over seven days and close to its 30 day low of 0.028901.

Prediction markets

Odds are from the Polymarket API at the time of writing, with one week changes and volumes as the venue reports them. The glossary entry covers how these resolve.

No change in Fed rates after the October meeting: 85.5 percent, up 3 points on the week, on $5.60 million of volume. A 25 basis point hike: 14.5 percent, down 2 points, on $3.73 million. The two cut markets price 0.4 percent between them, so a reduction is off the table. The notable part is direction: a hot CPI print did not raise hike odds, it lowered them. CNBC noted on Friday that a hold remains the expected outcome at the October 27 to 28 meeting, with Chair Kevin Warsh's rejection of forward guidance adding uncertainty rather than conviction.

US and Iran ceasefire continues through October 31: 84 percent, up 5.5 points on $1.86 million, the largest gain among the big non sports books. Netanyahu to be Israel's next Prime Minister: 26.5 percent, down 4 points on $1.78 million.

The planet

USGS counted 108 earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 or greater in the Monday to Sunday window, nine of them M5.5 or above and five at M6.0 or higher. All five carried green PAGER alerts, the lowest impact category. The largest was an M6.9 some 76 km northeast of Ozernovskiy, Russia, on Friday at 135 km depth. Two came hours apart on Tuesday on the central Mid-Atlantic Ridge, M6.8 and M6.7, far from anyone; the larger tripped a tsunami flag. An M6.1 struck 17 km west of Río Grande, Panama, on Monday, and an M6.0 hit 126 km south of Kokopo, Papua New Guinea, on Tuesday.

GDACS carried exactly one Red alert, and it was the week's real event: tropical cyclone Champi, active in the northwest Pacific from October 14, maximum wind 269 km/h, with an estimated 233,000 people exposed to Category 1 winds or stronger across Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and Japan. Fox Weather reported Champi rapidly intensified into a violent super typhoon with 150 mph sustained winds. The American Red Cross said the center missed a direct hit on Guam by about ten miles early Sunday, with Guam, Rota, Tinian and Saipan still losing power and water, and emergency declarations approved for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

The Orange alert for east Pacific cyclone Simon closed out on October 16, and the four Orange drought alerts still listed all opened months earlier. The Smithsonian weekly volcanic report was unavailable during this run, so there is no volcano detail.

Space

Four orbital launches flew inside the window, all successful, per The Space Devs. SpaceX took three, all on Falcon 9: Starlink Group 15-25 from Vandenberg at 00:28 UTC Tuesday, Dragon CRS-2 SpX-35 from Cape Canaveral at 10:33 UTC the same day, and the USSF-481 national security payload from Vandenberg at 00:01 UTC Friday. China's LandSpace flew a Zhuque-2E Block 2 with ten satellites from Jiuquan at 11:40 UTC Wednesday. Nothing flew Saturday or Sunday.

The internet

Cloudflare had a loud week: 34 incidents opened between Monday and Sunday, four rated major, including network failures in eastern North America and London on October 15. Workers Cron Trigger activation issues recurred on four separate days. OpenAI logged five incidents, one major, a widespread feature degradation on October 15 from 16:29 to 18:56 UTC. GitHub posted three, all minor. Claude's status page recorded none.

One caution on rolled-up indicators: at the time of writing Cloudflare's status summary still read Partial System Outage while its only unresolved incident was a minor WARP geolocation bug open since August 27. TerminalFeed's own feeds were clean, 114 of 116 live and 2 idle with none stalled, tracked on the status page.

The week ahead

  • Monday October 19, 19:41 UTC: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is listed Go to launch an H3 with JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration probe, bound for Phobos.
  • Tuesday October 20: housing starts and building permits.
  • Wednesday October 21: Rocket Lab is penciled in for an Electron with three HawkEye 360 satellites, date to be confirmed.
  • Thursday October 22: initial jobless claims for the week ending October 17, and existing home sales.
  • Friday October 23: S&P Global flash US manufacturing and services PMIs, and new home sales.
  • All week: the Fed is in its quiet period ahead of the October 27 to 28 FOMC, where Chair Warsh holds a press conference on the 28th.

The question the next two weeks answer is whether the AI unwind was a repricing or a break. The bond market has voted. The Fed books have not moved.

Sources