While inflation shows tentative signs of easing, both Bitcoin and Ethereum surged on positive macro data and market forecasts suggesting potential rate cuts. However, Fed officials seem to be less optimistic. We’ll explore the conflicting signals, unpack the Fed’s next move, and highlight key events that could impact markets this week.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) dipped to 3.4% in April, down from March’s level of 3.5%. Similarly, Core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, also slightly declined to 3.6%. This decrease, coupled with weaker-than-expected retail sales data, suggests consumer spending may be easing, further dampening inflationary pressures. However, the Producer Price Index (PPI), which reflects wholesale costs, exceeded expectations in April, suggesting price pressures persist and may eventually reach end-consumers.
Nevertheless, the CPI news on May 15 was followed by a daily surge in Bitcoin’s price, jumping 7.5% to around $66K. Furthermore, on May 20, speculation around a potential ETH spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the U.S. sent the market on an even bigger rally, with Bitcoin and Ethereum surging by 13.6% and 24%, respectively over the past week.
Figure 1 – Bitcoin/USD Performance Against Last Week’s Events
Source: TradingView
Still, the high-for-longer sentiment seems to be the overarching theme in the Fed. Last week, high ranks of the Federal Reserve like Chair of Supervision Michael Barr and Vice Chair Philip Jefferson reiterated that although April’s reading may be considered encouraging, it’s still not enough to change the Fed’s stance on cutting interest rates.
Later today, members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) have a busy schedule of events where they’ll speak about economic outlook and monetary policy, which will be closely monitored given their effect on the general market sentiment.Coming out tomorrow, the minutes from the FOMC meeting earlier this month are expected to reveal further clarity on the Fed’s next move regarding interest rates and money supply. Should this reveal a dovish stance, investors may be pushed towards riskier assets. According to CME FedWatch, market participants are currently pricing a 60% chance of rate cuts in September and 88.5% in December.
13F Filings Disclose Wall Street FOMO
Beyond the macro news, on Wednesday the deadline for the 13F filings concluded, revealing significant Bitcoin holdings among investment managers. There are 937 professional investors holding $11B in the U.S. Spot Bitcoin ETFs, representing 18.7% of the ETFs’ assets under management. In comparison, Gold ETFs had a modest 95 professional firms invested by the first quarter following the launch. Hedge fund Millennium Management is the largest institutional holder of the new funds, with roughly $2B invested, however the reach extended beyond traditional investment firms.
It has also been made public that the State of Wisconsin Investment Board purchased more than $160M in shares of Bitcoin ETFs in Q1, with the majority of that representing assets in the Wisconsin Retirement System, a growing trend that exemplifies the demand for Bitcoin as a store of value. Additionally, some of America’s biggest banks who had voiced adversary stances towards crypto have also reported Bitcoin ETF holdings. Morgan Stanley has recently disclosed it has $270M worth of shares while JP Morgan has invested $1.2M.
These disclosures are coming from the Wall Street giants who claimed Bitcoin was a bubble not so long ago. This level of adoption shows how Bitcoin’s fundamentals have pushed the world’s largest players to change their stance. Institutions are now mitigating their reputational risk by not delaying their Bitcoin adoption any further, which could otherwise be deemed unsound from an investment standpoint. On that front, last week Bitcoin ETFs crossed $1B in inflows, the best weekly performance since March, illustrating that Bitcoin adoption is not slowing down since the 13F filings. For instance, on a monthly basis, the ETFs have purchased over 21,700 BTC which is almost three times the new supply coming from miners, in the same time frame, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 – US Bitcoin Spot ETF Flows vs. Bitcoin Block Rewards
Source: 21Shares, Glassnode
Chainlink Continues Powering Tokenization
Chainlink is the leading decentralized oracle network, bridging the gap between blockchains and the external world. While blockchains are powerful, they live in siloed environments, meaning they cannot access information or data that exists off-chain. Chainlink offers an expansive set of Oracle-based services and leverages its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to integrate data from existing external systems across any blockchain securely. For instance, by providing Proof-of-Reserves for traditional assets or executing Verifiable Random Functions to fairly mintNFTs. Chainlink’s innovative solution has enabled over $10T in transactions across 22 separate blockchain networks, showcasing the reach this innovative protocol has on the wider industry.
Last Thursday, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the world’s largest securities settlement system which processed $3 quadrillion in securities in 2023, announced it successfully completed a pilot project in collaboration with Chainlink and major financial institutions such as BNY Mellon and JP Morgan. The project builds upon the existing DTCC Mutual Funds Profile Service I (MFPS I), which serves as the industry standard for transmitting NAV data, such as fund price and rate. The pilot does not affect initial workflows such as calculating fund data, as the focus was to create a standardized way to disseminate fund information across different blockchains. The project is likely to expedite real-world asset tokenization, which has become an increasingly important industry segment, showcased by tokenized government securities growing 10x in assets under management since the start of 2023, from nearly $100M to almost $1.4B.
Figure 3 – Market Landscape of Tokenized Government Securities by Product
Source: 21co on Dune Analytics
Every day, the DTCC’s service oversees the transmission of price and rate data for tens of thousands of mutual fund securities. In the current architecture, the DTCC links funds and service providers to distributors, collecting relevant fund data via a message queue and file-based methods, and finally disseminates them at regular intervals, as shown below.
Smart NAV extends the dissemination capabilities of MPFS I, where in addition to data being sent through existing channels, it is transformed into a modern JSON-based data structure. The newly formatted data is wrapped into a blockchain transaction, signed by DTCC’s private keys, and finally routed to Chainlink’s CCIP, allowing relevant fund data to be sent across almost any blockchain, private or public. Once the fund data is transmitted to these networks, a CCIP based smart contract forwards the data to the Smart-NAV-specific smart contracts responsible for validating permissions and storing data for the interested parties to consume.
The dissemination process highlighted above has an effect on traditional funds, as well as those represented on-chain. For instance, the real-time API sits off-chain and pushes fund data to all those integrated with the service. As soon as the relevant data is available, the API can be queried for both real-time and past information, which is impossible with the current MPFS I service. This distinction is crucial, as while the solution is inherently blockchain-based, it can clearly benefit participants who are not yet exploring tokenizing their funds, by allowing for faster and historical data dissemination. Additionally, Single Fund Consumer Smart Contracts and Bulk Consumer Smart Contracts, allowed participants to simulate tokenized funds, or a grouping of funds, which are instantly enriched with the respective data, as soon as available for the off-chain counterparty. This prevents users needing to store NAV data in a separate database that references the fund itself, thus allowing for a more streamlined tokenization process.
The collaboration between the DTCC and Chainlink represents a significant leap forward in the realm of tokenization. Chainlink’s CCIP abstracts away the need for the DTCC to directly connect to every blockchain network where tokenized funds may live on. This would be difficult for the DTCC to execute alone, given the potential costs and technical nuances that exist across chains. Hence, the use of Chainlink is vital as we envision a cross-chain tokenized landscape. The project presents a glimpse into the future where the process of distributing data is hosted on-chain, allowing for quicker, dynamic and historical distribution, empowering investors to make more informed investments. The project could be taken further to automate workflows, for instance the Bulk Consumer Smart Contract could represent a model portfolio, enabling the respective smart contract to rebalance these automatically. While the project is still young, any developments will be closely monitored, given the effect it would have on the growing industry segment of tokenization.
Each week the 21Shares Research team will publish our data-driven insights into the crypto asset world through this newsletter. Please direct any comments, questions, and words of feedback to research@21shares.com
Disclaimer
The information provided does not constitute a prospectus or other offering material and does not contain or constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy securities in any jurisdiction. Some of the information published herein may contain forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties and that actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. The information contained herein may not be considered as economic, legal, tax or other advice and users are cautioned to base investment decisions or other decisions solely on the content hereof.
En ny aktiv börshandlad fond utgiven av First Trust är tillgänglig för handel på Xetra och Börse Frankfurt. Det är en ny aktiv ETF från First Trust ger tillgång till buffertstrategi på S&P 500 med januari 2025/2026 som målperiod
First Trust Vest U.S. Equity Buffer UCITSETF – January eftersträvar en aktiv investeringsstrategi med syftet att spåra resultatet för S&P 500 Index upp till en fast övre gräns (tak). Samtidigt strävar fonden efter att säkra sig mot förluster (buffert) för de första 10 procenten av kursfall i slutet av den definierade målperioden på ett kalenderår. För detta ändamål investerar investeringsförvaltningen hela tillgången i FLEX-optioner. Dessa är sälj- och köpoptionskontrakt.
Buffertstrategin börjar och slutar varje år i januari och balanseras sedan om genom att fonden investerar i ett nytt paket med FLEX-optioner. Taket beräknas på första rapporteringsdatum beroende på marknadsförhållanden, medan bufferten alltid är oförändrad på 10 procent.
Namn
Kortnamn
ISIN
Avgift
Utdelnings- policy
First Trust Vest U.S. Equity Buffer UCITSETF – January
FJAN
IE000MDKBOB3
0.85 per cent
Ackumulerande
Produktutbudet i Deutsche Börses XTF-segment omfattar för närvarande totalt 2 351 ETFer. Med detta urval och en genomsnittlig månatlig handelsvolym på cirka 18 miljarder euro är Xetra den ledande handelsplatsen för ETFer i Europa.
Januari har börjat starkt på marknaderna, med flera kategorier av spanska fonder som noterade enastående avkastning i början av året. Och märkligt nog, och för första gången på länge, har det inte varit investeringsfonderna i USA som drivit upp avkastningen, utan snarare… de europeiska.
De flesta fonder som investerar i Europa, såväl som deras kategorier, har haft god avkastning i början av 2025. Värt att särskilt nämna är också aktiefonder i Brasilien och Latinamerika, som har lett uppgångarna i fondrankningen, följt av sektorer som traditionellt anses vara säkra tillflyktsorter såsom ädelmetaller.
Bästa fondkategorier – januari 2025
Brasilien och Latinamerika, från 0 till 100 på en månad (+8% / +12%)
Aktiefonder med fokus på Brasilien har varit månadens stora vinnare, med en imponerande avkastning på +12,24 % i genomsnitt under de senaste 30 dagarna. Återvinningen av dessa medel är betydande, eftersom de var de två sämsta kategorierna för året 2024 när det gäller lönsamhet.
Latinamerikanska aktier i allmänhet har också haft en stark utveckling med +8,72 % under månaden, med stöd av den goda utvecklingen i Brasilien och en förbättring på tillväxtmarknaderna i regionen.
Kategori
Månad
5 år
10 år
RV Latinoamérica
+8,72%
-2,15%
+1,81%
RV Brasil
+12,24%
-8,07%
+0,78%
Ädelmetaller lyser starkt
Guld och ädelmetaller har bibehållit sin roll som tillgångar till fristad under de första veckorna av ökad volatilitet med upp- och nedgångar orsakade av DeepSeek och Trumps tariffer, med guld- och metallgruvfonder som i genomsnitt ökat med +7,76 % under de senaste 30 dagarna, medan de som investerar direkt i råvaror har fått 6,24 %.
Kategori
Månad
5 år
10 år
RV Sector Oro y Metales Preciosos
+7,76%
+7,68%
+7,76%
Materias Primas – Metales Preciosos
+6,24%
+6,56%
+6,08%
Europa
Och slutligen ligger Europa före USA när det gäller avkastning, om än bara för tillfället, i början av 2025. Fonder från Schweiz, Italien och Tyskland är bland de länder som har de största ökningarna av eget kapital.
Large-cap fonder i Schweiz var de mest lönsamma i januari i Europa, med +6,46 % under månaden. Italien har också presterat anmärkningsvärt bra, med en månatlig avkastning på +6,16 %. Stora fonder i Tyskland har sett en ökning med +5,97 % under de senaste 30 dagarna.
Flexibla cap-fonder i euroområdet har presterat bra med ett genomsnitt på +6,19 % i januari, medan large cap-tillväxtfonder i Europa har uppnått +5,09 %. De med en Blend-strategi, som balanserar tillväxt och värde, har registrerat +4,75 %.
Aktiefonder inom finanssektorn har utvecklats bra de senaste 30 dagarna med +5,21 %. Bankverksamheten har startat starkt 2025 och konsoliderar den nästan 29 % genomsnittliga avkastningen som uppnåddes av fonder i denna kategori förra året.
Kategori
Månad
5 år
10 år
RV Sector Finanzas
+5,21%
+10,11%
+8,40%
Värsta fondkategorier
Indien och Asien har en svag start på året
Indiska aktiefonder drabbades hårdast i januari, ned -6,78 % under månaden. Thailand och Indonesien noterade också betydande nedgångar, med förluster på i genomsnitt -5,63% respektive -4,47%.
Sammantaget har den asiatiska regionen, exklusive Kina och Japan (Kina såg till och med små uppgångar), utvecklats svagt, vilket återspeglas i de negativa siffrorna för små och medelstora fonder i Asien (-3,19 %) och asiatiska aktier i allmänhet (-2,62 %).
Kategori
Månad
5 år
10 år
RV India
-6,78%
+12,27%
+7,80%
RV Tailandia
-5,63%
-3,59%
-0,83%
RV Indonesia
-4,47%
-2,84%
-2,22%
RV Asia (ex-Japón) Cap. Peq/Mediana
-3,19%
+8,38%
+5,86%
RV Asia
-2,62%
+4,06%
+2,89%
Alternativ energi
Alternativa energifonder var en annan av de sämst presterande kategorierna i januari, ned -3,44 %. Osäkerhet kring ny politik för förnybar energi efter Donald Trumps mandatperiod har satt press nedåt på dessa tillgångar. Fonder som redan 2024 hade utvecklats dåligt.
Xtrackers STOXX Global Select Dividend 100 SwapUCITSETF 1D (XGSD ETF) ISIN LU0292096186, försöker spåra STOXX® Global Select Dividend 100-index. STOXX® Global Select Dividend 100-index följer de 100 högutdelningsbetalande globala aktierna från STOXX Global 1800 Index.
Den börshandlade fondens TER (total cost ratio) uppgår till 0,50 % p.a. ETFen replikerar resultatet av det underliggande indexet syntetiskt med en swap. Utdelningarna i ETFen delas ut till investerarna (Årligen).
Xtrackers STOXX Global Select Dividend 100 SwapUCITSETF 1D är en stor ETF med tillgångar på 596 miljoner euro under förvaltning. Denna ETF lanserades den 1 juni 2007 och har sin hemvist i Luxemburg.
Index nyckelfunktioner
STOXX® Global Select Dividend 100 Return Index syftar till att spegla resultatet på följande marknad:
Företag från globala utvecklade marknader med hög direktavkastning
De 100 aktierna med högst utdelning från Stoxx Global-indexen
Viktad med årlig nettoutdelning
Årlig indexöversyn, största komponenten är begränsad till 10 %
Det betyder att det går att handla andelar i denna ETF genom de flesta svenska banker och Internetmäklare, till exempel DEGIRO, Nordnet, SAVR och Avanza.