🥛 When will markets move higher? 🚀

GM! This is Milk Road PRO, lighting up your email inbox each Saturday with a report that helps you invest successfully in crypto. 💰

Maybe you’ve heard that inflation is sticky?

Or that rates are going higher?

Or that markets are headed lower?

After all, the crypto market cap has already retraced 25% over the last 50+ days. 😭

So is it all over for crypto? Hell naw – the Milk Man is going to tell you what’s really going on in the markets right now.

TL;DR: We’ve entered ‘macro summer’ – and no, it’s not the time when the weather gets warm…

It's that phase in the business cycle – the recurring pattern of fluctuations in economic activity – where growth assets, like crypto, tend to perform exceptionally well.

Not familiar with the macro seasons? No worries, keep reading. 

But for context, here’s how Bitcoin performed in the 3 previous macro summers – yellow in the chart below – until the end of macro fall – red. 

Today's PRO report will help you understand what the business cycle and macro seasons are and how they impact our beloved crypto assets.

We’re also going to look into the timing of these seasons to help guide us through our investment timeframes. 

While the business cycle has been around for a long time, macro seasons are a newer concept, brought to light recently by Global Macro Investor.

GMI is a research membership for high net worth individuals and most of the charts and information from this report come from them.

Before we get into it, it’s important to note that what makes this macro summer even better is that most people are completely unaware of it, which is what makes right now the big opportunity.

It’s like being the first to wake up on a sunny morning after a long winter and heading to the beach, but when you arrive, no one is there. 

It’s a bit uneasy at first but you realize you get to pick whatever activity you want and there’s no crowd. 

It’s a blast, and soon after, everyone else shows up and it turns into a killer summer beach party where vibes are high. ✌️

That’s the moment we are in. Assets are cheap and the crowd – meaning liquidity – is sparse. 

But this is about to change as more investors are on their way – this report will attempt to explain why we believe this to be true.

At Milk Road PRO, we’ve extensively covered how crypto cycles are influenced by global liquidity cycles. If you need a refresher, check out our previous report. 

Today, we'll delve deeper into how liquidity drives markets and explore indicators that can help us anticipate what’s next.

THE ISM AND GLOBAL LIQUIDITY 💰

One of the best indicators to guide where we are in the business cycle is the ISM Manufacturing Index. 

This is a monthly indicator of US economic activity based on a survey of purchasing managers at more than 300 manufacturing firms.

The ISM is a composite index that gives equal weighting to new orders, production, employment, supplier deliveries, and inventories in the US and each factor is seasonally adjusted. 

Essentially, it gathers data from the economy to provide a view on where we are in the economic cycle – expansion or contraction. 

The ISM is very much correlated with global liquidity too.

Generally, when the Fed is stimulating the economy – or stops quantitative tightening and thus no longer throttles the economy – the ISM rises (aka economic activity) and of course so do markets. 📈

Below you can see the cyclicality of the ISM over the last 20 years.

The ISM is cyclical like this not because the economy ebbs and flows perfectly every 4 years, but because central banks control the money flows cyclically, refinancing their debt and printing money on a 4 year basis – again, read the liquidity PRO report for a refresher on this…

To show comparison, look how perfectly the global liquidity cycles below match the ISM cycles above.