What happened today: 09 Jan 26'
The daily market review
We continue the 2026 daily market review saga. Where I wrote with curiosity to curious people. I try to give exercise thoughts on what happened during the day. And what can impact the future.
Get in touch, and follow us. Thanks, Joao
We continued the negative flows in crypto ETFs. But, by surprise, SOL keeps having positive flows; in terms of ETF flows, it has been sustainable and quite interesting to think about, we had a big Monday followed by gross days. And it is not a surprise that this week SOL outperformed both BTC and ETH by more than 3%, while ETH underperformed BTC by 1%. Both BTC and ETH have had negative performance since Monday, with SOL up +1.8% so far.
Today was filled with a lot of interesting and important information. There is a move among equity investors from more growth companies to quality ones, where AI-related revenue and cost-reduction will have a real impact. Trivariate is bullish on Silicon Valley workflow automation platforms’ AI-led revenue growth, and these changes will be significant on the next earnings calls.
KKR CIO, Henry McVey, also mentioned the KKR move to the best companies, where credit spreads between BBB and AAA are as low as we’ve seen them. Outside the US, there are also interesting opportunities that we can’t miss. Credit is going to normalize. They are also techno-optimistic, in a world where revenue per employee is going up in big companies and going down in small companies, mainly driven by automation, digitalization, and productivity, where winners take the most. “All value has been in enablers of AI. I think the money will move out from just the enablers of AI to the people that actually apply AI across their business.”
Bobby, the Goldman macro trader, zoomed out and mentioned the 2025 big picture dominated by lower rates, a soft landing, stable growth, high employment, and value being applied to transformation tech. Retail keeps buying the dip, corporations buy back their stocks, M&A is at scale, and the debasement trend is pushing people up on the risk curve and into new stores of value. The world is basically risk on, especially where geopolitical tensions are emerging, and we don’t know the effects of the US/Venezuela conflict on wars like China/Taiwan, Russia/Ukraine, and Iran/Greenland.
This year is probably the year where the AI thesis needs to be shown on the earning calls, on the books. The realization of the possibility that the adoption of AI will take longer than expected will ignite the bear that many investors are waiting for to act. If positive outlooks are shown in the earnings, the bubble keeps growing.
Investors try to understand where we break the bull cycle, where it is topped, and labor is a crucial key point. Job listings are the first sign that the labor market is weakening. After the post-COVID boom of listings, we are currently in a situation with a clear downtrend in terms of job listings, followed by an increase in the unemployment rate. But the jobs data today gives relief, with the unemployment rate being lower than expected. Markets can breathe now.
No labor market problems give traders a high probability of no January rate cut. No stimulus is required in today’s US economy. The economy is going hot, you don’t need QE stimulus, and that’s the crazy reason why Trump found the way to launch their own version of QE, that we saw yesterday, by buying house mortgages.
The major mega trends of 2026 that achieved a consensus are: 1) Geopolitics: wars and rumors of wars; 2) AI will change everything: 2026 will be the year implementation will finally begin to show in corporate profits; 3) The debasement trade; 4) American renaissance: a long list of policy moves and deregulation.
Following these mega trends will probably increase the efficiency of having a massive year. I’m expecting defense stocks to be hot this year. AI will capture huge value in corporations. Bitcoin will have the bid for the debasement trade, with US deficits and world deficits going through the roof. People will fly again to the US if Trump brings back positive policies, while Europe is clearly left behind, starting the year with DAC8, a framework that turns on massive surveillance of the user, making privacy protocols basically illegal.
Besides mega trends, we had mega raises: a16z raised $15B to attack this new wave of innovation. Rain raised $250M in a Series C at a $1.95B valuation. And Tether invested $50M in Ledn at a $500M valuation.
But the two major crypto stories of today are not about opinions or raises. I read today that the majority of Venezuela’s oil has been sold in stablecoins, making Venezuela the first nation to manage a large share of its public finances in crypto, using Tether and Binance for their operations. This shows the real sign of adoption—payment and transaction adoption. Stablecoins will eat the world, and today this story was clear to me. Stablecoin transactions hit a record $33T in 2025, +72% YoY growth in total volume.
The second big story of today is Pump.fun. I saw during the first minutes of the session that Pump.fun was the top DEX in terms of volume, above Uniswap. Later today they launched a major update on creator fees, unlocking a bunch of new features regarding creator fees, including transferring coin ownership, sharing fees with other wallets, and revoking update authority. The market increased over 10% on this announcement, giving almost all back after, but the key point here is not the upgrade. It is the unlock of trust that it gives to buyers that the team is working, shipping, and leading Pump.fun. At an all-time high in terms of DEX volume, Pump.fun can be the enabler of the next crypto revolution with the livestream app, which has been key to my thesis. Alon, the founder, mentioned streaming meta created some of the best on-chain conditions of 2025, doubling activity by more than 2x.
On one hand, we have South Korea opening their markets, opening the economy for spot digital asset ETFs, BNY Mellon launching a tokenized deposit service for six clients. On the other hand, Iran is escalating conflicts, where Iran TV mentioned anyone who protests in the streets will be shot.
We must not forget privacy. After the major concerns on ZCash yesterday, and the price discovery afterwards, today we have the sign of the letter to support Roman—the Tornado Cash founder—from Vitalik. And Solana launched a hackathon for privacy products. Privacy is clearly a major trend and a crypto enabler.
That’s all for today. The best performer was Pump token and Morpho, which also had a great day. With majors being down on the last 24h performance, in order SOL < ETH < BTC, we are back to these alternative majors underperforming BTC. This is a concern for price momentum in a scenario where US equity markets, gold, and oil are ripping in our face.
There are always outliers; the white whale is one of them. It looks like it is the meme of 2026. With more than double the last 7 days’ price and 5x during the last 14 days, it has been crazy. This Pump.fun token is creating again the sense of FOMO for degen traders.