Daily range - from $2,324.97 to $2,463.31. Against Bitcoin, the pair stands at 0.02976 BTC (+2.1%). ETH capitalization - $298.62 billion, daily trading volume - $14.55 billion, with 122.14 million coins in circulation.
The trigger was US statistics. PPI (producer price index, wholesale inflation before the shelf) for September came out on October 15: +1.3% versus August against a forecast of +0.6% - the strongest jump since March 2022. The annual figure is +6.3% versus the expected +5.5%, the maximum since December 2022. A day earlier, CPI came out: 3.7% year-on-year against a forecast of 3.6%, core - 2.6% versus 2.5%.
Those betting on a decline were wiped out: ETH shorts were forcibly closed for $45.46 million (59.7%), longs - for $30.74 million. Liquidation is the forced closing of a leveraged position, and closing a short is done by buying, which in itself pushes the price up. Across the entire crypto market, $320.89 million and 84,257 traders were wiped out in a day.
Leverage did not leave the market, however: open interest (the sum of all open futures positions) on perpetual ETH contracts is $43.82 billion, practically unchanged. Binance's share of it is about 49% - a record since 2023. Public companies hold 8,096,612 ETH, which is 6.6% of the entire supply.
The Fed rate is currently 3.75-4.00% after the hike on September 16. The nearest fork is the meeting on October 27-28. Near-term levels to watch: $2,450-2,465 and $2,500 on the upside, $2,400 and the $2,325-2,350 zone on the downside.
Shorts were wiped out for $45 million - and where were you?
A 4% move in a day on ETH can be caught, but the amount you get from it depends not on the entry, but on the account's notional size. On three thousand, such a candle yields tens of dollars; on one hundred thousand, it's already a month's result. Prop trading is precisely the way to trade a large notional without comparable personal capital: a paid challenge, then the company's account and a share of what you earn. Before the Fed meeting on October 27-28, there is time to understand how the scheme works.