Replays · US payrolls (NFP) · 4 Nov 2022, 12:30 UK
The last calm Friday before FTX
There was nothing dramatic about the first few minutes after the October 2022 jobs report. Bitcoin rose just 0.14% in the first five minutes. Most of the move came later, over the next two hours, and by any normal measure the day was quiet. Two days later the FTX crisis began.
- 1 12:30 UK: the jobs report
- 2 13:30 UK: US stocks open and the Nasdaq falls
- 3 14:45 UK: Bitcoin's afternoon high, about 3.5% above the release price
A report with something for everyone
Employers added 261,000 jobs in October, a little below the previous month's 263,000 and still strong by historical standards. The unemployment rate jumped from 3.5% to 3.7%. Two days earlier the Fed had raised rates by 75bp for the fourth meeting in a row, and Powell had said rates would probably peak higher than previously thought. Traders were looking for anything that suggested the labour market was cooling, and the unemployment rate gave them something.
The slow climb
The response in crypto was gradual rather than sudden. After a flat first five minutes, Bitcoin rose to 1.2% higher at the half-hour, 1.7% at the hour and 3.5% at its peak a little over two hours after the release. That kind of delayed rally is unusual in our data. Most of the large NFP reactions do most of their work in the first five-minute candle.
US stocks went the other way, at least at first. When the cash market opened at 13:30 UK the Nasdaq 100 sold off, and it spent the early part of the session in the red while Bitcoin climbed. It was an unusual split in a year when crypto and tech stocks often moved together.
| Market | 15m | 1h | 2h | 4h | 1w | × normal hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | +0.61% | +1.73% | +3.01% | +1.51% | −15.99% | 3.7× |
| Ethereum | +1.10% | +2.94% | +4.95% | +3.04% | −19.58% | 5.0× |
| Solana | +1.76% | +3.95% | +5.30% | +3.17% | −45.14% | 7.0× |
| XRP | −0.27% | +0.42% | +1.96% | +0.15% | −21.38% | 0.6× |
| Chainlink | +1.36% | +3.08% | +3.95% | +2.96% | −12.82% | 4.3× |
| Litecoin | +0.86% | +2.81% | +3.62% | +4.32% | −4.34% | 3.9× |
| Cardano | +1.60% | +3.29% | +4.13% | +0.81% | −11.18% | 5.9× |
Crypto change from the 12:30 UK release. The one-week column covers the FTX collapse.
What the one-week column shows
On 6 November, Binance's chief executive said the exchange would sell its holdings of FTX's token. Within a week FTX had filed for bankruptcy. The table's final column captures that: Bitcoin down 16%, Ether down 20% and Solana down 45% from the moment the jobs report came out. The modest afternoon rally after the payrolls data was the last calm session before the crisis.
Viewed on its own, this release is a middling one: Bitcoin's first hour was 3.7 times a normal hour, ninth out of 117 NFP releases. It is worth reading as a reminder that market-moving events don't always come from scheduled data, and that a calm macro reaction says nothing about what the following week will bring.
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.