Bitcoin fell for a third straight week, and the driver rotated again. Last week a hot CPI print cracked the AI trade; this week the AI trade cracked on its own terms. Thursday October 22 did it: the Nasdaq dropped 2.6 percent, its worst session since June, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 6.7 percent after Lam Research flagged supply chain constraints and Meta raised its capital spending floor, per Zerocap's weekly wrap. Bitcoin closed the week at $80,048.50, down 2.38 percent and below its 50 day moving average for the first time since August.

The bond market read the same week and bought. The Fed books went further: Polymarket prices no change at this week's FOMC meeting at 94.25 percent, up 8.75 points in seven days. A week that sold risk assets did not raise hike odds. It erased them.

Markets

Weekly figures are Kraken daily candles, October 19 to 25 UTC.

AssetOpenCloseHighLowChange
BTC$82,001.70$80,048.50$84,840.00$79,120.80-2.38%
ETH$2,407.51$2,326.50$2,524.58$2,279.80-3.36%
SOL$103.98$101.25$109.15$98.51-2.63%

The shape matters more than the size. Bitcoin closed Wednesday at $84,022.50 after touching $84,840, then fell four sessions straight to a Saturday low of $79,120.80. Zerocap counted roughly $436 million of mostly long liquidations inside four hours that day. Live prices sit on the bitcoin dashboard.

Flows turned just as late. US spot bitcoin ETFs took in about $1.07 billion from Monday to Wednesday, including $526.6 million on Monday with BlackRock's IBIT drawing $665.2 million, its largest daily inflow in a year. Then $635.6 million left on Thursday, the heaviest single session since June, and $137.9 million more on Friday. The five day net still finished positive at roughly $301 million, per Farside Investors.

Sentiment lagged. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index opened at 59, peaked at 68 on Thursday and bottomed at 50 on Friday, ending Sunday at 54.

Equities lost less than the headlines implied: SPY closed Friday at $759.97 against $763.25 the prior Friday, down 0.43 percent, and QQQ at $704.40 against $709.80, down 0.76 percent. Thursday's rout was nearly bought back by Friday.

Treasuries rallied. On the US Treasury par yield curve the 10 year finished at 5.00 percent against 5.09 percent the prior Friday, down 9 basis points, after touching 5.15 percent on Monday. The 2 year fell 5 basis points to 4.69 percent and the 30 year 10 to 5.33 percent, flattening the 2s10s spread from 35 to 31 basis points. The inflation input climbed regardless: Brent settled at $116.72, up about 6 percent on the week, after Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia and reporting on possible US and Israeli action against Iran.

Positioning

Hyperliquid open interest totalled $11.13 billion across 178 markets at the time of writing, up 0.78 percent over 24 hours. Bitcoin was the largest book at $3.41 billion, or 42,597 BTC, with open interest up 1.08 percent on the day while the price fell 0.44 percent. Ether held $2.58 billion, or 1,116,314 ETH, up 0.90 percent. HYPE was third at $1.61 billion and the only major book shrinking, down 1.16 percent. The venue keeps about a day of history, so there is no weekly comparison.

The ETH/BTC ratio closed the week at 0.029064 on Kraken prices and sat at 0.028955 at the time of writing, down 0.96 percent over seven days and 9.54 percent over thirty, within a rounding error of its 30 day low of 0.028894.

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.

The Fed books were the big mover. No change after the October meeting: 94.25 percent, up 8.75 points, on $7.10 million of weekly volume. A 25 basis point hike: 5.5 percent, down 9 points, on $4.78 million. A cut prices at 0.15 percent. With the target range at 3.75 to 4.00 percent, traders have moved the hike debate wholesale to December.

Politics drew the rest. A Democratic sweep of both chambers in next week's midterms prices at 65.5 percent, up 3 points on $2.48 million. Ahead of Tuesday's Israeli election, Likud to win the most seats sits at 25.5 percent, down 4 points, and Benjamin Netanyahu to be the next Prime Minister at 26.5 percent on $3.48 million. The US and Iran ceasefire holding through October 31 prices at 85.5 percent.

The planet

USGS counted 196 earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 or greater in the Monday to Sunday window, against 121 for the prior week on the same query. Seventy two came from a single box around Vanuatu. Twenty were M5.5 or above, and seven distinct events reached M6.0 or higher.

The consequential one was an M7.0 that struck 191 km east northeast of Nagqu, northern Tibet, at 14:33 UTC Thursday, at 18 km depth. It was the week's only orange PAGER alert, and GDACS rated it Red with roughly 10,000 people exposed to shaking of MMI VII or stronger. The Nagqu media office reported 16 killed and 32 injured, 11 of them seriously, with at least 339 homes collapsed. CCTV called it the region's largest earthquake in five years.

Vanuatu supplied the volume: five M6.0 or stronger events, headlined by an M6.9 at 02:31 UTC Saturday at 10 km depth, which tripped a tsunami flag, followed four minutes later by an M6.3. All five carried green PAGER alerts.

Typhoon Champi closed out at 18:00 UTC Sunday after eleven days as a GDACS Red alert, with an estimated 291,000 people exposed to Category 1 winds or stronger from the Philippines to South Korea. The four Orange drought alerts still listed all opened between December 2025 and June 2026. The Smithsonian weekly volcanic activity report was unavailable during this run, twice, so there is no volcano detail.

Space

Eight orbital launches flew inside the window and all eight succeeded, per The Space Devs. The one that mattered went first: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries lofted JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration probe on an H3 from Tanegashima at 19:41 UTC Monday, bound for Phobos and a sample return. Friday was the busiest day, with four flights in under sixteen hours: Rocket Lab's Electron with three HawkEye 360 satellites from Mahia, a Long March 6A, a Long March 4B, and a Falcon 9 with Starlink 15-15 from Vandenberg.

The internet

Cloudflare opened 19 incidents between Monday and Sunday, one critical: a Zero Trust connectivity failure from 03:20 to 06:32 UTC Tuesday. Four more were major, including network problems across North America on Friday. GitHub posted seven, two critical: an hour of degraded Actions, Pages and Webhooks on Monday, and four and a half hours of pull request and webhook delays on Wednesday. OpenAI logged eleven, one major. Claude's status page recorded seven, one critical, a 34 minute window of elevated errors across three models late Friday.

The usual caution on rolled up indicators: at the time of writing Cloudflare's summary read Partial System Outage with zero unresolved incidents behind it, the state coming from 65 data centers marked degraded or offline. TerminalFeed's own feeds were near clean, 115 of 118 live, tracked on the status page.

The week ahead

  • Tuesday October 27: Israel votes for the 26th Knesset, the latest date the election could legally be held. Official results are due by November 4.
  • Wednesday October 28, 2:00 p.m. ET: the FOMC decision, target range 3.75 to 4.00 percent, with a hold priced at better than nine in ten.
  • Wednesday October 28: cyclone Arnab is forecast to cross the Andhra Pradesh coast in the morning. India's Meteorological Department has a red alert up for extremely heavy rain, and GDACS estimates 3.1 million people exposed to Category 1 winds or stronger.
  • Wednesday October 28, after the close: Microsoft and Alphabet report, Amazon on Thursday.
  • Thursday October 29, 8:30 a.m. ET: third quarter GDP advance estimate and the September PCE price index, together.
  • Friday October 30, 18:21 UTC: ISRO is listed Go for a GSLV Mk II carrying the IRNSS-1L navigation satellite.

Thursday is the real test. The decision itself is priced, so the press conference and the December hint carry the risk, and GDP and PCE land the next morning. The bond market has now voted twice. Equities and bitcoin have yet to agree.

Sources