News and analysis

EOS is down 1.0% to $0.6539 this week, lagging behind the broader cryptocurrency market, where Bitcoin (BTC) is rising by 3.2% to $87,348. The decline appears largely technical, with no major fundamental developments currently weighing on the project.

Despite EOS’s subdued performance, the broader market may soon receive a boost from macroeconomic catalysts. U.S. President Donald Trump is reportedly pressuring the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, a move that could ease monetary conditions significantly. Whether through rate cuts or a potential shift toward quantitative easing, any dovish pivot by the Fed would likely inject fresh momentum into risk assets—including cryptocurrencies.

Can you believe it's time for Easter already?! Where has the time gone? The two decades of April were spent completely for a set of emotional whipsaws in global markets. Easter baskets are one of my favourite childhood memories. However, this time I dare not to say is my Easter basket of assets full or empty of eggs. More precisely, there are a lot of various and coloured eggs, and even not all of my eggs are now in one basket, as there are big techs and consumer stocks, currencies and gold among them. But it is still unclear what particular size of profit, small or big, is hidden behind their painted patterns. They are only waiting to be cracked some later, but it is now difficult to predict where the delicious chocolate surprises would be hidden to pick them up already in May. Or, at least, within two or three months.

I have no doubt that each kind of fillings from these asset eggs will be tasty at some moment well before the end of the year, but dramatic price swings due to tariff battle fears have queered the pitch for investing minds in the short-term. What is clear right now is only that Gold is hitting records, already above $3,350, thanks to likely plans to replace Jerome Powell as Fed chief to cut US Dollar's interest rates faster. But possible stabilisation factors, like an Ukraine peace deal, originally designed in Washington and then transiting through Paris yesterday night, if successful, would cause a strong pullback for precious metals. If so, I prefer to take some profit from my Gold positioning to buy it lower and later again.

Besides, some major rotation from growth to value stocks happened on Wall Street, with the Consumer Staples select sector fund (XLP) adding nearly 3.5% in the course of the last 5 working days since April 10, even though the tech segment lost the most on average. But even here, things are not so clear. Businesses offering everyday consumer goods are seen as a hedge against recession risks and trade restrictions, but the upcoming US negotiations with Japan, and then other rivals, could shape things up to a risk-on mood. Consumer staples have recovered as if they never fell, but the total return on these assets is small, so they are good non-risky eggs, but not golden ones in perspective. The XLP index climbing from its current 82 points to 85 or slightly higher can be considered a done deal, but is that good money for an active investor like me? And the giant AI technologies which seem rotten eggs now could skyrocket at any moment, given their attractively low prices, to be quickly transformed into the class one eggs again.

Just look at how low the giant techs are now, and how much higher the upside potential is for the Technology Select fund (XLK), which includes all of my favourite stocks like Broadcom (AVGO), Google, Dell or the flagship NVIDIA, of course. Tech stocks don't guarantee anything, but they do hint at an average rise in the XLK index linked to them from current levels below 195 to 240, which would implicitly mean almost 25% additional profit. Once this basket of tech eggs recovers to its high value of the beginning of the year, of course. However, the mere lack of desire to continue the tech sale before the long weekend, and the preference for moderate crowd buying instead, gives a good sign.

There are also some very strange single eggs that can lie around for a long time and then turn out to be completely chocolate when ripen. I am talking about Eli Lilly (LLY), as an example, which I held throughout its lasting rollback down, but just yesterday this asset suddenly soared by 13%, from the $750 area to $850, promising to fly much higher, on news of a successful trial of Eli Lilly's new experimental pill for weight loss and against diabetes, although previously only injections medicine had a comparable effect. Eli Lilly's rival Novo Nordisk continues to fall with its Ozempic, while LLY shines brighter than ever, emerging as another off-basket golden egg in its own light.

I describe all this mainly to make a basic and probably trivial conclusion of mine that all those asset eggs I have ever bought to fill my baskets now deserve to remain inside intact and untouched. And who am I to choose which of them will ultimately become golden or more expensive than others, and which can simply be eaten with salt and bread some later? Perhaps, except for a couple of golden ones, which are actually very expensive Gold well above $3,300 per ounce, and also a couple of consumer staples eggs, which I am going to sell for the well-being and joy of my family right at the moment.

But I will hide the rest of the eggs back in their appropriate baskets to put them in a cold cellar until, I don't know, maybe even until Christmas, but looking in there throughout the year, week after week, to see if any of eggs have already become golden, so that it can be sold profitably at a proper time. Of course, I will not sell my Ripple in the near future, which I only bought a little over a week ago, and it is only just starting to grow well. And I will consider buying soon, perhaps, some other tokens from the crypto world too.

Ethereum Classic (ETC) is rising by 1.0% to $15.43 this week, closely tracking Bitcoin (BTC), which is also up 1.0% to $84,475. The broader crypto market is in a holding pattern as investors wait for clarity on the escalating U.S.-China trade tensions.

ETC has been pushed back to test its critical support at the $15.00 level—a threshold it has defended multiple times since February 2021. On four separate occasions, dips below this level were swiftly reversed, each time followed by strong rallies of 50% or more. That historical trend has traders eyeing a potential rebound, with a medium-term target of $25.00 now on the radar.

As European partners, or now rather trade rivals, of the United States continue to weigh the prospects of taxing social media and cloud businesses with American roots, the U.S. regulators do not forget their old intentions of frightening their own tech giants as well. Even before banning China's TikTok, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in Washington as an anti-monopoly supervisory authority was seeking to unwind Meta Platform’s acquisitions of prized assets like Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. These very attractive pieces have become the subjects of investigations, using some letters by Facebook's father Mark Zuckerberg as hard evidence.

An FTC official shared a 2012 letter in which Mark Zuckerberg allegedly said Facebook (which later became Meta) could buy Instagram to neutralize a competitor. Instagram was growing in value very fast at that moment, so that Facebook had to buy Instagram for $1 billion, which is not quite the same as eliminating them. This was supposedly the point of Zuckerberg's message to his teammates. One more letter said Facebook Messenger would beat WhatsApp if the latter would be acquired. This week, Zuckerberg was called to testify, which lasted more than one hour, and he had to answer questions related to these letters.

The key moment from his testimony was probably that even a breakup for Instagram was considered, as Zuckerberg floated the idea of spinning off Instagram amid mounting pressure on big techs from antitrust regulators in 2018. This should prove how seriously Meta took challenges of precisely the type of claims it now faces. "I wonder if we should consider the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company," he said in a document shown at trial. "While most companies resist break ups, the corporate history is that most companies actually perform better after they’ve been split up". When seeking to explain phrases in which he worried that Instagram was a competitive threat, Zuckerberg said the app’s camera was simply better than camera features Meta had developed. "We were doing a build vs. buy analysis" while being in the process of building a camera app, Zuckerberg explained, adding that he "thought that Instagram was better at that, so I thought it was better to buy them". He also argued that motivations do not matter because Facebook, and now Meta, does not have a monopoly.

The FTC attempts to convince the court that Zuckerberg rules Meta by adhering to a better-buy-than-compete strategy, and the scheme to expand the business empire, according to the agency, runs counter to antitrust laws. Facebook also tried to absorb another potential rival, which was Snapchat, for $6 billion, but the deal did not take place, and Zuckerberg warned that one should prepare for leaks of this information and all the negative background that may arise. The FTC needs to prove that Meta would not have achieved its current dominant position in the social media market if it had not bought Instagram and WhatsApp.

The FTC claims Meta monopolizes the market for social networks where users share with friends and family, but Meta is defending by arguments that the whole social media landscape has changed vastly ever since the FTC initially brought the case 5 years ago. Zuckerberg testified that now around 20% of content on Facebook and 10% on Instagram is generated by users’ friends as opposed to accounts they follow based on interests. "People just kept on engaging with more and more stuff that wasn’t what their friends were doing," he said. Increasing the amount of advertising in order to manipulate the service in a way that benefits the company rather than users was another FTC allegation, whereas increased competition could lead to better outcomes for users, such as the need to show fewer ads. Zuckerberg defended ads by saying that Meta’s system is designed to "show more ad content to people who like seeing ad content", so that Meta has even contemplated introducing a feed consisting entirely of ads. "I think we have discussed it at different points but I don’t think we have done it," he said.

The short video app TikTok has been the "highest competitive threat for Instagram and Facebook", he added, even though the FTC has not included TikTok or YouTube in its market vision where it says Meta has a monopoly, arguing that TikTok or YouTube are broadcast platforms rather than networks for connecting with friends and family. Yet, Meta’s share of the market drops below 30%, Meta shared, if TikTok and YouTube are properly considered and calculated.

Meta share price just wasted most of the growth it revealed during a powerful rebound on April 7-9, from below $485 to almost $585 per unit. The stock is trading only an inch above the most remarkable round figure of $500 on the back of investigation. However, we feel it as not just a very good, but rather a brilliant dip buying opportunity. We believe that Meta will be worth much more than $600 when the ocean wave of the next big bullish bounce rolls ashore on Wall Street.

The case is more likely to remain a formality, a legacy of the former Democratic administration, which saw it as a lever for pressure to get Meta's loyalty in the Covid era and before the election in 2020 and 2024. But the urgency momentum has been lost, and it seems that the Trump team is not interested in splitting Meta. Instead, it needs to bring together the giants of national business during trade disputes with other countries. The court had already warned the agency that it would have to make significant efforts to justify its vision of the market, especially since the social networks included in the Meta empire are mostly free, and Meta also has true competitors like X, formerly Twitter, owned by Google YouTube, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft LinkedIn or the same TikTok by China's ByteDance. Have the judges suddenly seen the light? Again, business transactions concluded so long ago are rarely cancelled by court even in minor cases. Beside that, verbal concerns about competition sound natural, and it's hard to imagine actual evidence of anti-competitive consequences.