Elon Musk Shows How Crypto Trading May Ruin Stock Traders' Weekends

The crypto-revolution has done a lot of things: Turned images of dogs into digital gold, lured talent and real dollars from Wall Street, and introduced a bewildering array of jargon to mainstream finance. And now you can add this: Showing what will happen in the stock market in advance.

Tesla Inc.'s shares dove Monday morning, but crypto-watchers already knew that was likely. That's because over the weekend, after Elon Musk's Twitter followers recommended he sell 10 per cent of his stake in the carmaker, digital tokens tied to the real shares had tumbled.

The U.S. stock market closes for the weekend at 8 p.m. New York time on Fridays, and doesn't reopen until 4 a.m. Monday. But crypto goes 24/7/365. That allowed traders on the FTX exchange and other venues to wager on Musk's tweets on Sunday and early Monday. They got it largely right

Photo Credit: Bloomberg

The real stock closed at $1,222.09 on Friday and dropped as low as $1,133 when trading resumed Monday. The Tesla tokens ranged Sunday between roughly $1,110 and $1,170 on FTX.

Such tokens, for Tesla and other famous companies, aren't actually issued by the corporations themselves. The FTX products are backed by real Tesla shares held by a firm called CM-Equity, and the tokens “can be redeemed with CM-Equity for the underlying shares if desired,” according to FTX's website. They aren't available for trading in the U.S. and other banned jurisdictions.

Traditionally, stock traders could unplug until 6 p.m. New York time on Sundays, when S&P 500 and other index futures resume trading at CME Group Inc.'s exchange after a weekend pause. But now, with crypto rapidly becoming more mainstream, those days could be numbered.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)