Bitcoin ETFs Erase October's Inflows With Their Worst Day Since June

One session took back everything October had given. US spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds posted a net outflow of $484.9 million on Wednesday, their heaviest single day since 25 June, on figures from Farside Investors that Cointelegraph and crypto.news carried early Thursday. The month's first four sessions had added $321.6 million between them. After Wednesday the October tally reads about $163 million out. Bitcoin was trading at an October low near $82,700 by Thursday morning.

Two providers, two totals

How big Wednesday's outflow was depends on who counted it. Farside's $484.9 million is the figure three outlets used on Thursday. The Crypto Times, working from SoSoValue, put the same session at $487.07 million. The gap is roughly $2.2 million, neither account gives a cut-off time, and the two do not reconcile. We could not establish which provider's close the other is measuring against.

BlackRock's IBIT carried most of the day either way, at $207.7 million out, about 43% of the total by crypto.news's reading. Fidelity's FBTC lost $105.1 million and ARK 21Shares' ARKB $101.7 million. IBIT had taken $122 million in the Tuesday session.

Ether funds are in a longer run

Spot ether ETFs lost $160.9 million on Wednesday, a seventh consecutive outflow session. Since 29 September the run has drawn about $569 million out of the group. BlackRock's ETHA accounted for $116.1 million of Wednesday's total and Grayscale's ETHE for $25.8 million, with smaller losses at VanEck, Bitwise, 21Shares and Invesco. Tuesday had already run $201.9 million negative, so Wednesday extended a move that was under way.

Where the price sat

Thursday's readings cluster without agreeing. CoinDesk's markets wrap, timed at 6:30 a.m. EDT, had bitcoin dipping to about $82,300 in Asian hours before recovering toward $82,800, some 4% below Tuesday's high near $86,600. Cointelegraph put it near $82,700 and down about 2% on the day. crypto.news gave $82,674 and 1.7%, The Crypto Times $82,652.75 and 1.8% at a 04:55 UTC snapshot. Both of the last two bound the 24-hour range at $82,317 and $84,340. No account names a common snapshot time, and the daily change they publish spans 1.7% to 2%.

Forced selling cooled. CoinDesk counted $400 million of liquidations on Thursday against $548 million the day before, with futures open interest down 1% to $150 billion. The Crypto Times gives Wednesday at about $546 million, 88% of it long positions. Those two Wednesday tallies differ by a couple of million and neither is reconciled against the other. The session before produced four published tallies that disagreed by more.

What the tape is waiting on

Yields are doing the work here. The 30-year Treasury yield rose four basis points to 5.71% on Thursday and the 10-year sat at 5.32%, with a $22 billion auction of the long bond due later in the session. September consumer price data lands on 14 October and the Fed decides on 28 October, with the September minutes out on Wednesday. Liquidity is thin underneath all of it: Glassnode's reading, carried by crypto.news, has combined spot and ETF volume averaging about $6.8 billion a day over seven sessions, below nine of every ten trading days since January 2024.

The level traders named on Thursday sat just above the market.

"Now we'll see if the bulls can retake the $83K level and hold it," the trader Daan Crypto Trades wrote on X.

Bitget Wallet's Lacie Zhang marks $82,000 to $82,500 as the downside liquidation zone and $87,500 as the level to reclaim before any run at $95,000. On October's record as a bullish month she was blunt, calling seasonality alone no investment thesis. Whether Wednesday was a single repricing or the front of something longer is not answerable from one print, and the cost-basis cluster that held through late September now sits above the price instead of under it.