5 Things You Need to Know to Start Your Day: Americas

Good morning. The BOJ hikes for the first time in 17 years and the YOLO crowd bet Nvidia could double in value this week. Here’s what’s movi [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Good morning. The BOJ hikes for the first time in 17 years and the YOLO crowd bet Nvidia could double in value this week. Here’s what’s moving markets. — [David Goodman]( Want to receive this newsletter in Spanish? [Sign up to get the Five Things: Spanish Edition newsletter](. BOJ Hikes The Bank of Japan ended the most aggressive monetary stimulus program in modern history this morning, [scrapping the world’s last negative interest rate](. But the dovish nature of the bank’s commentary hurt the yen, as the lack of clues on future moves and the bank’s indication that financial conditions will remain accommodative clearly showed its first hike in 17 years isn’t the beginning of all-out tightening cycle of the sort seen recently in the US and Europe. Nonetheless, John Authers says[everyone should be grateful]( for the exit from negative rates. Market Calm The hike had been well-flagged beforehand, allowing it to be [quickly absorbed by markets](. Japanese bonds gained and the Topix closed at the highest since 1990, while the dollar strengthened and Treasuries were little changed. Elsewhere, the Australian dollar was set for the weakest level in about two weeks after the Reserve Bank of Australia held policy rates at a 12-year high. Fed Questions Wall Street is now gearing up for the Federal Reserve’s decision tomorrow, and any signs on the US central bank’s intention to cut rates. The central bank also has a lot of [questions to answer about its balance sheet](, and officials will begin in-depth on the matter this week, including when and how to slow the pace at which the central bank drains excess cash from the financial system. At the heart of this debate is how much more policymakers can shrink the Fed’s $7.5 trillion portfolio of assets before worrisome cracks start to appear. Nvidia Options Meanwhile, Nvidia is [turning into a casino]( for the YOLO trading crowd, with some traders on Monday placing bets the the world’s third-largest company could double in value this week. While the trade is insignificant next to wagers on single-digit moves in the stock and there’s pretty much no chance Nvidia will close remotely close to the level of those options, it does bring back memories of 2021’s meme-stock mania. Traders could in theory sell the contracts for profit if Nvidia rallies this week, but the early signs aren’t too promising. The stock is flat in pre-market trading after Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang’s highly anticipated speech in California Monday — in which he unveiled [new Blackwell chips](aimed at extending his company’s dominance of artificial intelligence -- [proved more of a boon]( for the shares of the company’s customers and partners than Nvidia itself. Bitcoin Drops One asset that’s no stranger to outsized moves is Bitcoin, which [slid TuesdayÂ](as investors digested a record daily outflow from the world’s biggest exchange-traded fund for the token. The largest digital asset shed about 3% to trade after the $25 billion Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, or GBTC, posted a $643 million outflow on Monday, the most since it converted into an ETF on Jan. 11. Joe Weisenthal takes a closer look at the current crypto landscape below. What we’ve been reading This is what’s caught our eye over the past 24 hours. - The average [Wall Street bonus dropped](slightly to $176,500 last year. - China Evergrande’s alleged $78 billion fraud is[among worst](. - [Unilever surges](after saying it plans to separate ice cream arm. - UBS powers past [$100 billion a year](after Credit Suisse fall. - Corporate earnings show [cracks in the strength](of UK consumers. - How the top oil trader’s brazen corruption was [caught on tape](. And finally, here's what Joe’s interested in this morning A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that this crypto bull market was different, because there's (blissfully) almost no talk about the underlying tech. Nobody's talking about "Web3" of "world computers" or anything like that. The theme is entirely flows based. The approval of the ETFs widens the lanes for institutional money to flow into Bitcoin, and so everyone just wants to frontrun the next person, who will be trying to frontrun the person after that. Of course, once you establish that the entire thing is about flows and frontrunning, then there's no reason to just stick with Bitcoin. And there's no reason to go with coins that have any pretense of soundness or sustainability. And so we've seen the mother of all memecoin bull markets emerge. Nobody needs another chin-stroking thought piece about the meaning or significance of memecoins. We can just skip right over that. I'll leave it to VCs and Twitter threaders for that. One thing that's interesting though is that people are going for low-cost chains, like Solana, at the expense of more decentralized, older chains such as Ethereum. I'm writing this Monday afternoon, so some of the numbers you see on the screen may be hopelessly out of date by the time you're reading this. But over the last 7 days, many of the coins have been selling off pretty significantly. Bitcoin down 7%. Ethereum down 14%. But the low transaction fee chains Solana, Binance, and Avalanche have been soaring. This is from [Coingecko](: Interestingly, the legacy memecoins aren't doing well. Dogecoin down 18.8%. Shiba Inu down about the same. Of course Doge is super old school and uses its own chain. Shiba Inu is an Ethereum-based memecoin. Meanwhile, here's a one-month chart of Solana-based dogwifhat, which now sports a market cap of nearly $3 billion. Crypto in its most honest form. No talk of use case. No talk of decentralization. No talk of network security or anything like that. Just low-cost gambling Joe Weisenthal is the co-host of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast. Follow him on X [@TheStalwart]( Like Bloomberg's Five Things? [Subscribe for unlimited access]( to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. [Bloomberg Markets Wrap: The latest on what's moving global markets. Tap to read.]( Follow Us Like getting this newsletter? 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