Japan reopens for business today...while re-locking down Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo for COVID, extending the current lockdown set to expire on May 11, now kicked back to end of May.
Tokyo Olympics 2020 2021 20?? here we come!

Just some quick points on where Japan stands with vaccinations. And let me remind you (because a reminder will be sorely needed after you’ve read this)- Japan is a wealthy, developed, globally integrated, democratic, G7 country with enough medical staff and infrastructure in place to provide high quality universal healthcare to a (relative to it’s western democratic allies) apolitically non-partisan, non-populist, non-faith based, pre-COVID mask wearing culture of the world‘s oldest (and thereby most demographically at-risk) population. Just a reminder.

According to Oxford Univ, at end of April, the number of vaccinations per 100 people stood as follows:

Israel: 121

United Arab Emirates: 106

United Kingdom: 71

Japan: 2.4

Cool. Now here’s a moving chart of the share of people who have received at least one vaccine (% of population) from Our World In Data:

If Japan exerted some effort, competency and common sense prioritization, maybe it will one day get as good as global leaders in fighting pandemics and protecting its citizens like India and Brazil. Maybe one day.

What the hell is wrong with Japan you say? Why I’m glad you asked.

Japan has a history of problems with medication. Meaning, there is a history of using the prior sentence as an excuse / explanation for its inexplicable rejection... (More)

I'm with Peter Brandt on this: kid with a ruler classical chart patterns work wonderfully well on crypto. Perhaps even better than listed assets, as crypto isn't directly intervened (QE, YCC, buy anything that moves) by CBs. Tech analysis works best in free (unintervened) markets. Fed bond-buying doesn't care about your wave-count or cycles analysis.

Overnight we see key mid-March support at $50k was taken out cleanly on the first attempt. Not even "once, twice & through" - sliced like a knife through hot butter.

It looks negative on every timeframe. Having gone up 16x in a year, it can pull back a long way and still leave the bigger bullish story intact.

Why's it happening?

The chartist will say "time and price were up".

The macro analyst might say "Bitcoin is taxed in the USA like a commodity and Biden's new capital gains tax needs to be paid for".

The mass psychologist might note that when people are quitting their jobs to become full-time crypto traders and when banks have talent drought because of the same, the bubble has reached its zenith.

This is how the dotcom bubble ended in Q1 2000, with dentists quitting their jobs to become TMT day-traders. Meme stocks in 2021 are too reminiscent.

Approx. supports to watch on the way down $47k, $43k, $27-29k, $14-16k. It went down from $20k to $4k in the last big correction - equivalent low this time just under $13k. No point being more precise when BTC... (More)