Wintermute Weekly Report: CPI Falls More Than Expected Amid Escalating Iran Tensions, BTC Closes Higher Against Trend to Become Week's Strongest Risk Asset

According to Wintermute OTC trader @Jjay_dm, June CPI fell 0.4% month-over-month, the largest single-month drop since April 2020, overall inflation decreased from 4.2% to 3.5%, the market immediately priced in a hold for the July FOMC, and the probability of a rate hike in September also dropped from over 75% to 63%. However, the US restarted a naval blockade on Iranian ports and conducted air strikes for the fourth consecutive night, Brent crude surged 15.54% in a single week, reaching a high of $87 per barrel, pressure for energy inflation to rebound is accumulating, casting doubt on the sustainability of this CPI decline. Meanwhile, China's Moonshot released the open-source model Kimi K3, claiming performance comparable to frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, directly impacting the AI compute narrative, TSMC fell 7% in a single day, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index recorded its worst weekly performance in 15 months, the Nasdaq dropped 4.16%, and Nvidia temporarily ceded the top spot in global market cap to Apple. The crypto market, however, strengthened against the trend, becoming the best-performing risk asset of the week. Within minutes of the CPI data release, BTC surged from around $62,000 to $64,900, ETH jumped 7% in a single day to $1,884, CoinGlass data showed approximately $134 million in short positions were liquidated within the first hour. BTC ETF