TokenInsight TradFi Weekly #005: Did Perps Price the Weekend Gap Before Stocks Reopened?

1) Gold led volume; LITE led gains.

Gold perps traded $26.65B from September 28 to October 4, the most of any TradFi perp in our sample.

Lumentum (LITE) perps rose 16.8%, the biggest gain this week.

Outside crypto: US payrolls rose just 29,000 in September (90,000 expected), and the 10-year Treasury yield touched 5.34% midweek, its highest since 2002.

2) Optics rallied; CYPH fell the most.

LITE (+16.8%), Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI, +15.1%) and Coherent (COHR, +13.9%) rose with the optics group on October 1, when Coherent launched its PhotonLink interconnect and Bernstein started coverage.

The Brazil ETF (EWZ) gained 13.2% as right-wing candidates beat polls in the first round of Brazil's election.

On the downside, Cypherpunk Technologies (CYPH, −26.6%) holds ZEC, which fell 14.8% the same week. AppLovin (APP, −13.2%) slid after Wells Fargo called its e-commerce pickup "a false start." Cerebras (CBRS, −12.2%) reportedly lost an OpenAI workload as its share lockup expired. MiniMax (MINIMAX) fell 13.8%.

3) Same direction, different size.

We compared each perp's move from Friday 8pm ET to Sunday 8pm ET with the stock's gap from its Friday after-hours close to its first Sunday overnight trade.

SNDK and MU came closest: within 0.04 percentage points.

MSTR missed by the most. Its perp rose 2.81%; the stock reopened 3.68% higher, 0.87 points more. CRCL's perp overshot its stock; KORU, a 3× Korea ETF, undershot as Korea's market stayed shut on Monday.

One weekend is a single case, not a track record.

4) Weekend trading thinned out, then picked up before the reopen.

Across 23 exchanges, weekend TradFi perp volume averaged $3.18B a day, about 11% of the $29.11B weekday average.

In our hourly sample of 14 stock perps, the busiest weekend hour started at 6pm ET Sunday, two hours before stocks reopened.

5) Next week: inflation and chip earnings.

US September CPI lands Wednesday, October 14. After weak payrolls, the odds of an October rate hike fell from about 70% to about 14%; CPI can move them again.

ASML reports Q3 results this week, and TSMC holds its earnings call on Thursday, October 15, alongside US retail sales.

TokenInsight TradFi Weekly, updated every week.