Bitcoin’s 2.6% pop beat the S&P 500’s 0.5% drop, a rare win

For one day, bitcoin acted like bitcoin again.

The largest cryptocurrency climbed 2.6% on Monday to trade above $64,000, its best single-day showing in more than a month, according to CoinDesk data. The S&P 500 went the other way, closing down 0.52%.

That combination is the part worth pausing on. BTC didn’t just beat stocks, it moved in the opposite direction entirely. Which used to be unremarkable.

The high-beta asset that stopped acting high-beta

Bitcoin has spent most of its life as the higher-beta trade next to equities. When stocks moved, BTC moved more, in both directions. That was the whole pitch for a lot of people.

The last three months have not looked like that. “BTC outperformed the stock market today. This has become a less common occurrence lately. 1/2 In fact, BTC only outperformed the S&P 500 on around one third of trading days over the last three months,” blockchain analytics firm Glassnode said in a Telegram chat.

Do the math on that. Underperforming two-thirds of the time isn’t high beta. It’s lagging.

Where the money went instead

The AI trade on Wall Street is a big piece of it. Capital that might have rotated into crypto has been pulled toward AI names, and it’s come out of other corners of the financial market to get there.

So the money isn’t gone. It’s parked somewhere with a better story right now.

The four-year cycle is doing its thing

The other drag is structural, or at least self-fulfilling. Bitcoin’s four-year cycle put it in a bear phase after BTC peaked above $126,000 in October last year, and that peak was followed quickly by the turn.

That bear phase is expected to bottom out by October this year. Whether you believe the cycle is real mechanics or just a belief that enough people act on to make it real, demand for BTC has stayed subdued through it.

What Monday actually tells you

One green day against one red day on the S&P is not a trend reversal, and nobody serious is calling it one. But it’s a data point in a stretch where those data points have been scarce, and it’s the strongest daily move BTC has managed in over a month.

If you’re watching for the correlation to break in bitcoin’s favor again, the thing to track isn’t the daily close. It’s the ratio Glassnode flagged. One-third of trading days is the number to beat, and one Monday doesn’t move it much.

Bitcoin was quoted at $64,118.43.