JPMorgan has highlighted a significant increase in selling and profit-taking across equity and crypto markets, driven largely by retail investors. The global investment bank also observed institutional momentum traders and quantitative funds reducing positions, particularly in stocks, bitcoin, and gold.
Insights on Market Trends by JPMorgan
JPMorgan, a global investment bank, has provided insights on recent trends in the crypto and equity markets. Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, a managing director specializing in Global Market Strategy, including Alternatives and Digital Assets, shared his perspective on crypto in a Linkedin post published Thursday. He wrote:
The past weeks saw significant selling/profit taking in both equity and crypto markets with perhaps retail investors playing a bigger role than institutional investors.
“Retail investors appear to have sold both crypto and equity funds. And several proxies of the retail impulse into equities have downshifted over the past month such as those based on small traders’ option flows, on the relative performance of retail investors’ favorites vs. S&P500 index, or on retail investors’ sentiment surveys such as the AAII [American Association of Individual Investors] survey,” he stated.
Panigirtzoglou continued:
In terms of institutional investors, it has been mostly momentum traders such as CTAs or other quantitative funds that appear to have taken profit on previous extreme long positions in equities, bitcoin and gold.
“For other institutional investors outside quantitative funds/CTAs [commodity trading advisors] we detect a more limited de-risking so far, thus leaving room for further position reduction from here,” he noted.
Earlier this month, Panigirtzoglou expressed expectations of a near-term decline in the price of bitcoin following the halving, citing overbought conditions. He also highlighted the subdued level of venture capital funding for crypto projects. “We do not expect bitcoin price increases post halving as it has been already priced in. In fact, we see downside for the bitcoin price post halving for several reasons,” he explained.
Source: Bitcoin
