markets

Luke Kawa4/21/25

Bitcoin’s divorce from US tech stocks another damning sign of the “sell America” trade

It turns out Tyler Winklevoss wasn’t wrong. He was just early.

On the weekend following Liberation Day, the Gemini cofounder said that bitcoin’s resilience following an end-of-week meltdown in US stocks in response to Liberation Day indicated that bitcoin was “now behaving like a hedge to geopolitical uncertainty.”

The crypto asset promptly fell out of bed shortly following his remarks (womp womp!). But fast-forward a couple weeks and, well, you gotta hand it to him. Bitcoin has often behaved like a hyper-correlated, leveraged play on US tech stocks and recently, it hasn’t been trading like a US risk asset. It’s been trading without the taint of being associated with America — a characteristic that’s been damning for US stocks, government bonds, and the greenback.

Bitcoin’s has been an excellent store of value since April 2 (the last trading day prior to President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs announcement in the Rose Garden). The digital currency is up about 2% over this time while the Nasdaq 100 is down nearly 9%. Not as good as gold, to be sure, but way better than the US dollar or long-term Treasury bonds, that’s for sure.

Most of the divergence is fairly recent, occurring in the past couple trading days as the “sell America” theme in financial markets has gone viral.

It’s a troubling sign, from the perspective of an owner of US assets, that the desire to sell America and own not-America appears to be playing a dominant role in driving price action across financial markets, overwhelming bitcoin’s traditional solid relationship with US tech stocks.

More Markets

See all Markets

markets

Matt Phillips2h

Margins, and selling the news: analysts look to explain Oracle's tumble

The somewhat counterintuitive tumble in Oracle shares continued into afternoon trading Friday, despite Wall Street analysts’ more-or-less favorable reaction to Oracle’s investor day presentation Thursday, where executives said the company’s AI cloud business would eventually sport margins of between 30%-40%, far better than the figures reported by The Information back on Sept. 7.

And yet, the stock is on its way to its worst day in the last six months. What gives?

Gil Lauria, who covers Oracle for D.A. Davidson & Co. — who has it at “hold” with a $300 price target — has a theory, telling Sherwood:

“Investors are disappointed that the entire growth acceleration in Oracle is from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business, and that Oracle expects the rest of the business to grow low single digits.

The other disappointment came from Oracle acknowledging that the GPU rental business only had 30-40% gross margins, far lower than the 80% gross margins for the rest of the business.”

Other analysts we’ve chatted with on background say they’re not convinced the margin story is the source of today’s slump, pointing to the also plausible explanation that the drop might just be a sign traders bought the stock ahead of the presentation to analysts on Thursday anticipating positive announcements, and now they’re selling simply selling the news.

Analysts generally like what they heard from Oracle, but shares are down

Analysts generally like what they heard from Oracle, but shares are down

Gil Lauria, who covers Oracle for D.A. Davidson & Co. — who has it at “hold” with a $300 price target — has a theory, telling Sherwood:

“Investors are disappointed that the entire growth acceleration in Oracle is from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business, and that Oracle expects the rest of the business to grow low single digits.

The other disappointment came from Oracle acknowledging that the GPU rental business only had 30-40% gross margins, far lower than the 80% gross margins for the rest of the business.”

Other analysts we’ve chatted with on background say they’re not convinced the margin story is the source of today’s slump, pointing to the also plausible explanation that the drop might just be a sign traders bought the stock ahead of the presentation to analysts on Thursday anticipating positive announcements, and now they’re selling simply selling the news.

markets

Analysts generally like what they heard from Oracle, but shares are down

The big news out from the Oracle AI World conference was broadly positive: that margins on cloud infrastructure can be as high as 35%, and that the company predicts $166 billion in infrastructure revenue by 2030.

And in the wake of that news, today UBS raised its price target for Oracle shares to $380 from $360, saying they are undervalued.

But investors appear to have some concerns about Oracle’s huge capex plans, which are fueled by huge AI infrastructure deals with OpenAI and Meta, as shares dropped over 7% in Friday trading.

Analysts have pointed to Oracle’s high cash burn as it pursues its AI build-out and potential financing needs as flies in the ointment that could blunt the impact of the company’s strong longer-term growth forecasts.

On Friday, Jeffries analysts wrote:

“Questions remain about ORCL’s capex requirements to meet growing demand, as there was no forward-looking commentary on capex at the Analyst Day. Capex will need to ramp in line with [Oracle cloud infrastructure] revenue growth, raising concerns about ORCL’s financing options to support this expansion.”

However, if that’s the reason why the stock is getting hit today, it would mark a distinct change in how investors are evaluating the AI trade. Companies have tended to be increasingly rewarded for their aggressive capex commitments to enhance the boom, based on optimism that investments in this would-be revolutionary technology will bear fruit.

Friday’s dip comes on the back of a strong run leading up to the yesterday’s investor conference, fueled by a flurry of AI headlines. Oracle shares have gained over 18% in the past three months and more than 70% so far this year, well outpacing the Nasdaq’s approximately 7% and 16% rise over the same time periods.

markets

Matt Phillips5h

AST SpaceMobile drops after Barclays cuts rating to “underweight”

AST SpaceMobile, which provides cellular services from space, dove in early trading after Barclays analysts cut their rating on the shares to “underweight” (essentially a sell) from “overweight” (or a buy), citing “excessive” valuation on the still money-burning company. The fact that analysts went from “buy” to “sell” — with no momentary stop at a “hold” or “neutral” rating — makes it a fairly rare “double downgrade.”

They wrote:

“Valuation has run ahead of fundamentals... In our last update, we increased our price target from $38 to $60 as we took a more constructive view on pricing; we found it supportive that TMUS/Starlink launched a text only service for $10 per month and believe that AST products which will be richer (text, call, broadband) could see higher prices points. Since then the stock price has doubled from $48 to $95.7.”

With the shares up almost 120% over the last month through Thursday, and a price-to-forward-sales ratio of 140x — the Nasdaq Composite is around 5x — the stock might be due for a cooling-off period.

'There's nothing perfect in this world of growing apples.' Extreme weather could complicate future harvests.

The remarkable rise of the Honeycrisp and Cosmic Crisp apples

When it comes to apples, America cannot get enough of the crunch factor.

David Crowther, Claire Yubin Oh5h

Markets trim losses, shaking off regional banking jitters and bubble fears

Stock futures: sinking. Bitcoin: bashed. Gold: soaring. VIX: spiking. Even the AI trade is hurting in the premarket.

US-ECONOMY-BANKING

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, or Robinhood Money, LLC.

©2025 Sherwood Media, LLC