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.
