Whales’ Market Wrap: Apr 16 BTC 30D ATM IV: 47.10% | ETH 30D ATM IV: 67.58% | SOL 30D ATM IV: 89.83% SPX 30D ATM IV: 26.26% | QQQ 30D ATM IV: 30.71% | GLD 30D ATM IV: 22.73% BTC annualised 1yr implied yield: 6.80% ETH annualised 1yr implied yield: 5.47% The US stock market seems to have fallen into an "emerging market cycle." Due to policy instability, any new news will only stimulate the market up or down in the short term. In the long run, the market will be in a long-term "shock decline" or remain unchanged at a certain level, which means that long-term investment is unprofitable. The impact of tariffs is undoubtedly one of the reasons, but "domestication" may be a more profound factor. Domestic stock markets tend to perform worse than global stock markets in the long run, which is reflected in many large economies. In the past five years, the FTSE 100 has risen by no more than 50%, the STOXX 50 has only risen by 73%, while the S&P 500 has risen by more than 93%, and the NASDAQ 100 has risen by more than 120%. However, as the US stock market has become "domestic", its operating characteristics are actually rapidly approaching domestic stock markets in recent months. From the perspective of the options market, investors' medium- and long-term expectations for US stocks have also become similar to those of domestic stock markets. Investors generally tend to allocate less exposure to domestic stock markets. As a result, gold prices hit new highs, and BTC's implied forward yields rebounded above 7% for the first time after weeks of depression. Investors' medium—and long-term bullish expectations for gold and BTC also remained stable and did not change significantly. In contrast, the implied forward yields of equity assets still have no significant gap with the risk-free return, which means that investing in equities is still not a good choice for now. Interestingly, the overall sentiment of block traders towards the crypto market tends to be risk-averse. For BTC, in addition to a small number of call spreads, many traders hold tail protection at a relatively low cost through put calendar spreads. For ETH, which is closer to equity assets, investors are not reluctant to express bearish views directly; the sluggish performance of equity-like crypto assets seems to continue for a long time.