Splinterlands Daily Focus Chest - Slow Start to the Season | Market Headlines & Crypto BTC, HIVE, SPS, GLX, DEC, FORGE (January 17, 2023)

After an amazing 66 Champion Chests season...

• This is avery slow start
• Only 2 Diamond chests for the first day

Daily Focus Chests - +2 Diamond

Wild battles are tough...

• I am holding onto Diamond III in Modern for the time being, to pick up Diamond Daily Focus chests
• This early in the season is usually very tough, risk of dropping to Gold III and not coming back up for day is very real

• I started with an ECR in the 80s, this is not a representative of how many games I could play
• For about half as many games than usual, overall there were more losses than wins (it's good that it's only half as many games)
• Dipped to Gold II and been since hovered around the border
• The goal immediately is to bring Wild to Diamond, so I have the flexibility to play Modern without risking losing out on the Diamond Daily Focus Chests

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Market Headline Today - Goldman Sachs MISSED earnings forecast by a significant margin

• GS dropped 7%
• Earning was $3.32 per share vs. $5.48 estimate
• This is the biggest miss in over a decade
• Revenue also declined, $10.59 billion vs. $10.83 billion, down 16% year over year
• Previously announced lay off of 3200 employees, should we expect more to come?
• This is a bad omen to the economy, and weak sign to the earnings overall for other corporations. We are not out of the woods
• Overall loan losses could still be up even more for the banks, and it will spillover to the broader market

As much as crypto people don't like fiat (so they say), having fiat and the liquidity right now may be the biggest blessing this year to capture potential opportunities and buy up assets at steep discounts

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Crypto Market Today - BTC has recovered fully from the FTX collapse

BTC is still at the resistance

• What doesn't go up must come down
• It was a nice and quick recovery, I still question its sustainability based on the simple reasons of broader weakness in the economy and tight capital conditions
• Traders may be taking profit soon
• Miners may not be able to hodl forever as there are capital and energy costs to recover
• People have to sell into strength to cover day to day in this economic environment
• There is no COVID "stimulus" to the masses this year, unlike 2 years ago
• Climate change high energy and food costs will have a lot of people reprioritizing just to survive
• Will FTX recovered crypto assets be subject to liquidation? Is that the next leg down?

HIVE is holding steady, up another cent today to 36 cents

• Volume has died down (or returned to normal if you will)
• The thing with HIVE is it has very low volume and liquidty
• It does not take a lot of HIVE to move the price up or down significantly

HIVE/BTC pair is flat 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀

SPS is steady 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀

• Staked SPS went up again by about 1.5 million

GLX is steady at the 0.097 SWAP.HIVE (fiat value improved somewhat to 3.5 cents)

FORGE is running out of liquidity

• There was a very decent update yesterday
• Stamina is now 500 (yay, people can finally sleep without botting)
• Bots also got nerfed, apparently a timer is added on the server side to control how quickly you can submit an attack
• Overall it's good, but it is annoying even for players without bots. It takes ages to dump 500 stamina. Definitely not happening in the morning before heading out to work
• It times out even when you submit your battles manually

DEC is declining again against HIVE (as expected for a "stable" coin that's significantly below peg)

• DEC has more sell pressure than buy
• It is very difficult to cash out any meaning amount without dropping the market price by a few percentages...
• That's the issue of investing in assets with low liquidity, the risk goes both ways. Only purchasing a few grands would pump up the price, selling a few grands would drop the price materially

As much as I love Splinterlands assets, just for the liquidity reason alone, it is more prudent to instead focus on BTC during this phase of the market

HIVE base token would be interesting again if and when it gets oversold again

What if I ended up missing out if I don't buy at this level and it just keeps on going up? I have coins to sell and I will buy something else 😁

Not going to FOMO even at this level, I know it is still cheap compared to the crazy last year