IN THIS ISSUE (21) - 26 October 2026
📉 Bitcoin’s volatility is a part of the game
🚀 SpaceX and Tesla are eyeing a merger
🏛 The GENIUS Act finally gets its rulebook
THE WEEK IN MARKETS
Wall Street spent the week recovering from the AI sell off. The Nasdaq ended roughly flat, the S&P 500 added 0.2% and the Dow gained 1.3%, with Tesla and Meta rising after earnings and SpaceX jumping about 7% on revenue up 161%. The ceiling was oil. Brent climbed about 6% to near $112 on Houthi strikes and Hormuz tanker attacks, with the 10 year yield near 5.15% and a hold priced at roughly 85% for the 27 to 28 October Fed meeting. Gold slipped 1.5% to about $4,110.
Crypto traded the Fed and oil, not its own headlines. Bitcoin finished near $81,900, down 0.4%, Ether lost 1.4% and Solana 1.5%. The OCC finalised its stablecoin rules and Musk confirmed SpaceX and Tesla are exploring a merger that would combine more than 30,000 BTC. The market noted it and moved on.
🔥 WHAT’S UP: SpaceX | +7.2% | 1 week
💧 WHAT’S DOWN: Netflix | -10.4% | 1 week
Data correct as at 22 October 2026.
THE BIG READ
Volatility is the price of admission
Every few years Bitcoin falls by half or more, and every few years the internet treats it as breaking news. The asset has lost more than 75% of its value on four separate occasions since launch, and each time the obituaries arrived on schedule. Each time, the chart kept going anyway. The swings are not a malfunction. They are the entry fee.
Why it moves like this
Bitcoin is a young asset with a few structural quirks that make big moves normal:
Always open: it trades 24 hours a day, so price discovery happens at 3am with nobody supervising.
No anchor: there are no earnings, no central bank and no balance sheet to tell the market what it is worth.
Thin enough to feel it: the market is small enough that large orders leave footprints, and leverage turns footprints into craters. Last October, about $19 billion in leveraged trades were forced closed within roughly 24 hours, the largest event of its kind on record.
Stocks do the same thing, just slower and with a dress code.
Same source, same reward
Volatility and return come from the same place. An asset that never moved could not compensate anyone for holding it, which is why a savings account pays what it pays. The drawdowns and the long run gains are one story told from two ends. The movement is the cost, and the return is what that movement has historically paid.
The only question that matters
Whether Bitcoin will fall again is the easy one, because history says it will. The useful question is how much movement you can sit through without making a decision at the worst possible moment. That comes down to position size and time horizon, not prediction, and nobody can answer it for you.
QUICK TAKES
🏛 GENIUS gets its rulebook
The OCC finalised its GENIUS Act rules on Wednesday, the first US regulator to do so, and eased the reserve limits issuers had been dreading. The yield question was left open, so crypto firms cheered and banks sulked. The framework takes effect on 18 January. Read more
🚀 SpaceX for every kid
Elon Musk has promised one SpaceX share to every child in America next year, which at roughly 73 million kids is a gift worth about $10 billion. How it gets delivered, and when, remains a detail for a later post. A generous way to raise a generation of shareholders who will never sell. Read more
🏦 Buffett’s cash pile outruns the chip trade
In the past three weeks Berkshire Hathaway has gained about 8% while the major semiconductor ETFs have lost 10% to 11%, as worries about financing costs and AI returns hit chip and infrastructure names. The stock that sits on nearly $400 billion in cash is now within sight of its record high. Doing nothing has rarely looked this active. Read more
PROBABLY SOMETHING
Elon Musk says a SpaceX and Tesla merger would be “a good idea”, and the two companies have formed special committees to discuss it, a long way up from July’s polite remark about “more and more overlap”.
A combined company would also hold about 30,200 Bitcoin, Tesla’s 11,509 plus SpaceX’s 18,712, worth roughly $2.5 billion and enough to rank among the largest public corporate holders. Read more
