The entire crypto market was falling. ETH dropped below $2,300 and traded around $2,316 (-3.79%), XRP - $1.28 (-2.47%), SOL - $100.44 (-3.84%). Back on Thursday, October 23, Bitcoin was holding steady above $81,000, while oil was rewriting a six-month high.
The reason was a report by The Wall Street Journal on the morning of October 24: the US is rapidly evacuating embassy staff and military facility personnel across the Middle East due to intelligence that Iran is preparing attacks on Americans. Previously, it was only about part of the personnel in Saudi Arabia.
In a Friday memorandum to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton wrote that Iran "has substantially increased efforts to work against American personnel", and attack plans "have reached an advanced stage". Trump himself at a rally in Florida on Friday hinted at a new strike: "We can stage another small Epic Fury", and he linked escalation to the time after the midterm elections in early November.
ETH has a separate story: over 28 days, minus 14.7%, which is 9.15 percentage points worse than Bitcoin over the same period. US exchange-traded funds on ETH (funds through which the asset is bought like a stock) recorded another outflow of funds on October 22.
The nearest risk on the calendar is the elections themselves in early November and any new statement on Iran: such headlines come out on weekends, when crypto is trading and other markets are closed.
Were you in a position when this headline hit?
Saturday, markets closed, crypto is falling on news from the WSJ - and what decides is not analysis, but what is written in the rules of your program. Somewhere, holding a position through a geopolitical headline and the weekend is normal; somewhere, carrying over the weekend and trading on news is strictly prohibited, and the daily drawdown is calculated based on the maximum intraday. These are the clauses you read before paying, not after your account is blocked. Selecting by instruments and limits takes a minute.