Yesterday’s newsletter covered potential Fed decision scenarios and four corresponding trade ideas. Here’s how they played out.

The Fed delivered the base case, and then some. Wednesday’s FOMC statement held rates at 3.50%–3.75% for a fourth straight meeting, but the real signal was the dot plot: the median 2026 rate projection jumped to 3.8%, up sharply from 3.4% in March. Of 18 officials submitting projections, nine now favor at least one more hike this year. Markets are pricing roughly a 50/50 shot at a hike by October. This wasn’t a neutral hawkish hold — it was hawkish hold plus a hike signal, more aggressive than the newsletter’s 65%-likely base case anticipated.

New Chair Kevin Warsh, in his debut press conference, stripped out language that had hinted at future easing and stuck to a leaner, more data-driven statement. Inflation projections moved up materially — core PCE for 2026 now sits at 3.3%, versus 2.7% projected in March — while growth and labor forecasts barely budged. Scenario B was the right call on direction. The dovish surprise didn’t happen.

There’s an attractive contrarian scenario that our CEO continues to beat the drum on.  He believes that the inflation increase is transitionary due to oil and energy price increases.  But with the Iran conflict over, oil prices down 20%, oil production increasing, AI productivity rising and new Fed chair, our CEO believes that the FED will not hike in 2026 and may even start talking about deflationary forces in 2026/2027.  Which would be very bullish for BTC and crypto in general.

The bearish trade: partial win

ETH short — flagged as the deepest liquid short with the weakest trend structure. The thesis mostly held. ETH traded down into the $1,740s–$1,790s range through the decision, with a clean break below $1,750 triggering over $120M in liquidations as leverage flushed out. It never found the “explosive snapback” Scenario A would have required, and the hawkish dot plot kept pressure on. Score: thesis confirmed, though ETH found some support stickiness in the $1,700–1,800 band rather than continuing the straight-line bleed.

ADA short — this was the cleaner win. ADA continued grinding lower, trading around $0.17, consistent with the “weakest large-cap structure” call. No surprise bounce, no support reclaim. The hawkish outcome extended the existing downtrend exactly as the support-breakdown screener flagged.

The bullish trade: this is where it gets interesting

Here’s the part the newsletter didn’t anticipate: HYPE didn’t wait for a dovish surprise. It made a fresh all-time high near $76.90 the day before the Fed decision, completely decoupling from the macro setup. The move was driven by Hyperliquid-specific catalysts — spot ETF inflows of $172M even as Bitcoin ETFs bled $5.6B, SpaceX perpetuals becoming the platform’s largest market at $1.4B in daily volume, and a deepening Coinbase/Circle relationship. By the time the Fed actually spoke, HYPE was already pulling back modestly from that high, trading in the low-to-mid $70s — a classic “sell the news” cool-off after running hard into the event, not a reaction to the hawkish outcome itself.

WLD told the same story. It gained another 12% on June 16th, riding an AI-narrative wave (SpaceX’s market debut, OpenAI public-listing chatter) and a disclosed institutional stake from Eightco Holdings worth roughly $400M. It also showed signs of cooling afterward, but the move was front-run entirely by sector-specific flows, not by Fed positioning.

The lesson: the momentum thesis behind Scenario A was structurally correct — HYPE and WLD did lead a bounce, with the “rare full alignment” and “resistance breakout” setups flagged in the screener proving out. But the catalyst was idiosyncratic flows, not a dovish Fed pivot that never came. A trader who sized those longs only as event-driven bets tied to Wednesday’s outcome would have missed most of the move, since it happened beforehand and on different fuel.

What’s next

1. The hike conversation is now real, not hypothetical. With nine of eighteen officials projecting tightening and prediction markets near 50/50 on an October move, the macro tailwind crypto has leaned on since 2024’s cutting cycle is genuinely at risk of reversing into a headwind. Re-running the ETH/ADA short thesis into the next print makes sense only if trend scores stay weak — worth a fresh altFINS check rather than assuming continuation.
2. Watch whether HYPE and WLD’s idiosyncratic strength survives a true risk-off macro shock. Both names proved they can rally against a hawkish backdrop on protocol-specific news. That’s a different and arguably stronger setup than the dovish-surprise dependency the original trade idea assumed — but it also means they’re more exposed to narrative reversal (AI hype cooling, ETF flow reversal) than to Fed-driven swings.
3. The next real test is the October meeting, where the dot plot now implies a live possibility of the first hike since 2023. Between now and then, CPI and labor prints will matter more than usual — a soft August/September print could pull the rate path back toward the original Scenario A setup the market never quite got this week.