Photo by Kanchanara on Unsplash

Bitcoin, gold and caution in financial markets

FOMO vs red flags everywhere.

Yaakov C Lui-Hyden
10 min readMar 10, 2024

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Introduction

As the Chinese say, “May you live in interesting times” and times are indeed interesting. We have stockmarkets at record highs, gold at record highs and Bitcoin at record highs. Is “this time is different” valid? Are we going through a golden age of AI fuelled growth and Spot ETFs on crypto?

Lay of the land

The Japanese Nikkei breached 40000, the highest it has been since 1989. US stocks are at record high, the Nasdaq, in particular, has had an AI led boom with stocks like Nvidia going parabolic.

The Australian ASX is also at record highs.

But beneath these numbers, we see a total destruction in the Nickel market, with full writedowns of Western mining companies in that space, Lithium too has cratered but has recovered somewhat. Iron ore is also plummeting.

The first too relate also too expected demand for EVs, as well as countries like Indonesia( thanks to Chinese investment), pumping out an oversupply.

Before the AI boom was the EV boom, and right now the reality doesn’t look that crash hot. Tesla’s Shanghai factory has had a 19% fall in orders year on year.

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Yaakov C Lui-Hyden

Yaakov is a world traveller and is accused of being an Australian. Published several novels. He writes about travel, writing, geopolitics and trading.