Bitcoin crashes to $84,000 from $90,000 in minutes as gold makes new high of $4,410

The NYSE confirmed it won’t adjust its trading hours on Dec. 24 or Dec. 26, even after President Donald Trump signed an order to close the federal government on both days.

Markets will run on their normal timetable, with no special holiday shifts, despite the federal shutdown window.

On Capitol Hill, Steve Scalise said House Republicans are committing to a vote early next year on a bill that would ban members of Congress from owning or trading individual stocks.

Scalise explained that lawmakers have been shaping the proposal for months and expect it to move through committee before hitting the floor, stressing only that “we want to get that done.”

He didn’t clarify whether the plan would cover the executive branch, which Democrats have been pushing to include.

Other Republicans signaled the answer is probably no. Nancy Mace said the bill “would just address Congress” as she left a meeting with Mike Johnson and colleagues backing the trading ban.

Anna Paulina Luna added that the vote is set for January, saying the goal is “no more insider trading.”

The announcement came one day after Democrats put forward their own version that would extend restrictions to presidents and vice presidents, a move that now threatens the bipartisan momentum the effort originally had.

By the close, stocks shook off a four-session drop. The S&P 500 rose 0.79% to 6,774.76, the Nasdaq Composite climbed 1.38% to 23,006.36, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 65.88 points to finish at 47,951.85.

President Donald Trump said he has finished interviewing “three or four” finalists for Federal Reserve chair, adding that he expects to settle on a nominee “pretty quickly” as the search to replace Jerome Powell enters its final stretch.

Trump wouldn’t commit to revealing the pick before year-end, but said the decision will land “over the next couple of weeks,” framing the timeline around his push for deeper rate cuts to pull down mortgage costs.

Trump made it clear he sees all the contenders as viable, and he spent Thursday walking through each name with unusually warm language.

Asked about Christopher Waller, Trump said they met again on Wednesday and called him “great,” describing him as someone who’s “been there a long time.”

He stopped short of confirming whether Michelle Bowman is officially in the last group but offered positive remarks about her as well, mirroring comments he made last week.

In that earlier interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump acknowledged Kevin Hassett and Kevin Warsh as frontrunners, saying “the two Kevins are great,” while hinting that a few other candidates remain in the mix.

He also repeated his call for rates to be pushed to “1% and maybe lower than that,” a stance that’s now shaping the entire direction of the selection process.

The S&P 500 climbed 0.8%, the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.5%, and the Dow Jones spent most of the session hugging the flatline after being up nearly 480 points earlier in the day.

The entire rally is being driven by one name: Micron Technology, which ripped 12% after delivering fiscal first-quarter numbers that blew past every estimate on the Street.

On the earnings call, Micron’s leadership said the surge is being powered by data-center demand for the company’s memory products, especially the high-bandwidth units feeding AI servers.

Sumit Sadana, introduced as the business chief, had told analysts that the company is “more than sold out,” with a pipeline that still can’t cover current orders.

Micron now expects the total addressable market for high-bandwidth memory to reach $100 billion by 2028, rising at a 40% CAGR, and the firm lifted its capital-expenditure outlook to $20 billion from $18 billion to keep pace.

The beat pushed Wall Street into full recalibration mode. JPMorgan raised its price target, pointing to a clean pricing setup. Bank of America upgraded the stock to a buy.

Morgan Stanley said the quarter delivered the strongest revenue and net-income upside in the entire history of the U.S. semiconductor industry outside of Nvidia, and added that if AI demand keeps expanding at this pace, memory will be the trade with the widest coattails over the next year.

The AI complex moved in sync with the print. Alphabet added about 2%, while Nvidia, Amazon, AMD, and Meta pushed more than 2.5% higher.

Microsoft climbed 2.3%, Tesla gained nearly 5%, and Oracle recovered 2.2% after sliding on Wednesday over questions about data-center financing. Palantir also jumped 5.2%, rounding out a sector-wide rally that pushed tech back into the spotlight.

Gold futures just blasted through $4,410 per ounce for the first time ever, locking in a 67% gain for 2025 and pushing the metal toward its strongest annual performance since 1979.

The rally has been driven by relentless central-bank accumulation and heavy inflows into gold-backed ETFs, which have accelerated as volatility in crypto and equities keeps stacking up.

Platinum is running the same race, extending a six-session surge that’s taken it close to $2,000 an ounce and pushed its year-to-date return past 100%, marking the biggest annual gain in data tracked since 1987.

The fuel behind this run is coming straight from tightening conditions in the London market.

Banks have started parking more metal in the US to shield inventories from potential tariff shocks, while exports to China have stayed strong all year.

Sentiment around Chinese demand has lifted even further now that futures for these metals are trading on the Guangzhou Futures Exchange, which has become a fresh hotspot for speculation.

Open interest on the nearest June contract has exploded, trading volumes are rising, and prices on the exchange are printing well above international benchmarks, feeding even more momentum into the global rally.

Elsewhere in metals, silver dipped slightly, palladium pushed higher, and the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index slipped 0.1%, adding one more tailwind to a market that already looks supercharged.

Bitcoin just fell another $3,000 in thirty minutes, dropping to $87,000, and the move wiped out about $140 million in levered longs almost instantly.

Traders are already calling this the same liquidation loop that hit yesterday, and the tape looks just as tense.

Options data now shows Bitcoin heading into the final weeks of 2025 with $23 billion in contracts expiring next Friday, a cluster big enough to crank volatility even higher.

More than half of all open interest on Deribit sits inside that expiry, and it’s turning the market into a pressure cooker.

Price action has become chaotic, with Bitcoin swinging over $130 billion within a single hour during US trading on Wednesday, taking long and short traders out at the same time. The wider crypto market is still hovering around the $3 trillion mark, but everything feels brittle.

Positioning around the Dec. 26 expiry is split right down the middle. Calls are stacked at $100,000 and $120,000, suggesting some traders still believe in a relief rally.

Puts, though, are dominating day-to-day sentiment, especially the $85,000 strike where STS Digital estimates about $1.4 billion in open interest, a level that may act as a magnetic pull the closer we get to expiry.

After this rollover, traders expect new positioning around two triggers: hedging ahead of the Jan. 15 MSCI ruling that could eject digital-asset treasury firms holding more than 50% of their assets in crypto, and another round of call-overwriting strategies as volatility stays elevated.

Sentiment is shaky. Down 23% this quarter, Bitcoin is pacing toward its worst performance since Q2 2022, back when the collapses of TerraUSD and Three Arrows Capital ripped the market apart.