Tale of the Tape 

Howdy folks. Welcome back to the market of stocks!

Nifty and Sensex ended with minor cuts; down -0.2% each. This tracks the muted sentiment across Asian markets today after Trump’s flip flop on tariff war with China. Broader markets also traded mixed with Midcaps (+0.1%) barely up and Smallcaps (-0.2%) down. 334 stocks in the NSE 500 ended in the red.

Except PSU Banks (+0.2%) all other sectors finished flat or lower. FMCG (-0.9%) and IT (-0.8%) were the top losers.

In today’s issue of the Daily Rip, we break down the insane crypto meltdown over the weekend, unpack Dmart and Waaree Renewables Q2 results, the biggest newsmakers and more.

Honourable Mentions:

CE Info Systems rallied +10% intraday on buzz that it could be integrated with Zoho’s Arattai app. PS - MapMyIndia was also endorsed by the IT minister last Friday. BSE was up +4% on reports that SEBI may not remove weekly expiries anytime soon.

Check out the NSE 500 heatmap:

Crypto
Crypto Is Not For Beginners

Crypto had a crazy AF weekend after Trump threatened China with new tariffs. The biggest one-day selloff on Friday was a goddamn thriller with insane losses, eyewatering margin calls and one big whale walking away rich. Here’s a quick breakdown of what happened.

The flashpoint was Trump threatening retaliation against China’s crackdown on rare earth exports. He then followed it up in like ~6 hours with a 100% tariff threat from November 1. Investors naturally got spooked. Big trade war returning = spike in geopolitical uncertainty = panic crash.

The numbers: In ~24 hours, crypto bets worth more than $19 billion were wiped out. ~$7 billion of those positions were sold in less than 1 hour of trading. Overall, 1.6 million traders liquidated. Bitcoin nosedived from ~$125k to ~$101k while ETH, Solana and XRP plunged up to -22%. PS - CoinGlass called it the “largest liquidation event in crypto history”, worse than the FTX crash in 2022 and Covid in 2020!

So why did crypto get hit worse than equities? Experts say the blow was harder because of the way crypto margin calls work. Some exchanges use auto-deleveraging (aka ADL) which means highly-leveraged positions are closed automatically. This speeds up selling, which in turn speeds up the crash.

Except, one whale PRINTED money by taking a massive short position allowing them to net ~$200 million in profit. Was it a lucky guess or actually a seller that was looking to mitigate some of their losses? Some industry analysts are pointing out that the selloff started at least an hour before Trump issued his first threat… so you decide.

Big Picture: Since 2020, investors have treated crypto as a safe haven asset like gold. The underlying idea is that both gold & crypto will be safeguards against geopolitical uncertainty like tariffs. But if there’s one thing this last weekend taught us, that’s no longer true.