👀 Major Topstep Outage amid Market Bloodbath

Hi guys, it’s Kieran! Another week is upon us and the markets are open, so lets get into it.

📢 Prop Firm Industry News

Topstep traders experienced a major outage on Thursday, causing charts to freeze leaving traders unable to open or close trades.

The issue was due to a hardware failure at the CME data center.

Thankfully Topstep jumped on the issue quickly, resetting the accounts of negatively affected traders..

and even some that were not effected 😀 

Kudos to Topstep for playing fair. One of the most trader friendly firms for sure.

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🕜 Red Folder News

Here are this week’s red folder news events. A quiet week on the calendar, however US jobs numbers on Thursday will be interesting, particularly if they disappoint trump who has rightly lamented the frankly ridiculous revisions to previous NFP numbers we saw last week, prompted him to immediately fire the BLS head responsible for them.

It’s hard to disagree with him on this one..

📈 The Macro View

From ‘Extreme Greed’ to ‘Neutral’ in a week

The last 2 days of the week felt like a bloodbath for risk assets. However after all the drama, Nasdaq was only down 4%, with BTC down 3.5%. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and sentiment has fully reset already. Futures green this morning.

Institutions did not buy the dip

Since this +33% monster S&P500 rally started on Liberation day back in April, institutions have been sitting on the sidelines watching retail bid up the market relentlessly. Did they buy the dip this time? Nope. Positioning on Goldman Sachs Prime Book remains neutral. Institutions continue to sit on their hands.

The last time the Nasdaq fell 2% on the first trading day of August was...last year.

The index actually fell 2%+ on each of the first three trading days of August last year for a 3-day drop of 7.6%.

After that? A couple of days of chop and the rally was fully retraced by Aug 16th. A V-shaped recovery. Very typical of what we have seen through Trumps presidency so far. Let’s see how it plays out.

Ok guys stay safe out there and i’ll see you next week!

Kieran

📚 Further Reading

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