Recaps · US payrolls (NFP) · 8 Dec 2017, 13:30 UK
The jobs report nobody in crypto was watching
December 2017 was the peak of the first great crypto mania. Bitcoin had roughly doubled in a month, and regulated futures were days from launch. The US jobs report that Friday was solid and unremarkable. Bitcoin's move afterwards was not.
The figures
The BLS reported 228,000 new jobs in November, with October revised to 244,000. Unemployment held at 4.1%. US stocks treated it as a non-event: the S&P 500 ETF was -0.01% after an hour and +0.17% at four hours.
Bitcoin's hour
Bitcoin was $14,550 at 13:30 UK. It rose steadily rather than jumping, reaching about 8.7% above the release price at 14:45 UK. At the hour it was +4.4%, which ranks #2 of 117 jobs reports in our data, at 8.3 times a normal hour. Bitcoin's normal hours were large at the time, so even this multiple understates how wild the market was.
Nothing in the jobs data explains a move this size. The more likely driver was the crypto market itself: the Cboe was due to open the first US Bitcoin futures on Sunday 10 December, and buyers had been piling in all week.
| Market | 15m | 1h | 2h | 4h | 24h | 1w | × normal hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | +1.77% | +4.42% | +5.91% | +3.50% | +2.40% | +20.62% | 8.3× |
| Litecoin | +1.23% | +3.77% | +13.51% | +24.14% | +50.81% | +184.94% | 4.9× |
| Ethereum | +1.24% | +1.14% | −1.22% | +3.01% | +7.30% | +51.44% | 1.7× |
| XRP | +0.41% | −2.13% | −2.13% | +0.55% | +3.74% | +225.56% | 2.7× |
Change from the 13:30 UK release, sorted by the first hour.
Litecoin
Litecoin's run started slowly and then accelerated: +3.8% at the hour, +13.5% at two hours, +24.1% at four and +51% at 24. CNBC reported that it hit a record of about $342 on 12 December. It was +185% a week after the release. XRP was +226% over the same week, while Bitcoin was +21%.
Ether and XRP did not join the first-hour rally. XRP was -2.1% at the hour.
This recap is a reminder that a release-time window can catch moves the release didn't cause. When a market is in a frenzy, any hour can look like a reaction. The fair reading is that this jobs report coincided with a strong afternoon in an extraordinary month, rather than caused it.
Sources: release time and figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (public domain), first-print values via ALFRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Crypto: Bitstamp 5-minute candles; SPY/QQQ: IEX. No consensus forecasts are shown because they are proprietary; comparisons are with the previous release. “× normal hour” compares the first-hour move with the median move in matched quiet hours. How we measure it.