For months now, bitcoin has followed a frustratingly familiar pattern for bulls: seemingly overcorrelated with the Nasdaq 100 when the stock gauge went down, but lost almost all correlation when the leading technology index moved higher.
This week proved no different, with the Nasdaq down 2% on Thursday and bitcoin falling twice as much. Friday then brought a modest rally for tech stocks, one that bitcoin didn’t come close to matching.
Heading into the last 6 six weeks of 2025, year-to-date gains for the Nasdaq 100 are now at 20%, while bitcoin is barely in the green, up just 3%.
A reflection of asymmetry
What’s happening, according to a report this week from Wintermute’s Jasper De Maere, is not a loss of correlation with the Nasdaq 100, which remains high at around 0.8.
“This is not a breakdown of correlation, but a reflection of asymmetry, the uneven way BTC reacts to risk,” De Maere said. “When stocks rise, BTC’s reaction is muted. When they sell off, BTC tends to move more sharply in the same direction.”
De Maere measures this through “performance bias,” where “positive bias” is bitcoin that outperforms in a risk-on environment, and “negative bias” is bitcoin that lags in a risk-off environment.
It will come as no shock to anyone aware that bias has been solidly negative for some time.
Trying to put a number on it, Da Maere charted the percentage of days on a 365-day rolling basis where BTC has seen a positive performance bias relative to the Nasdaq.
What he found is that it has fallen to levels not seen since the bottom of the last great bear market in late 2022.
Why so bad? Da Maere suggests a loss of mindshare for bitcoin, as both institutional and retail speculative appetites have been quite satisfied in equities. There are also liquidity issues as ETF inflows have slowed, stablecoin issuance has fallen, and market depth across exchanges remains below early 2024 levels.
Hopefully a view
“Historically, this kind of negative asymmetry does not occur near the top, but rather near the bottom,” Da Maere concluded. “When BTC falls harder on bad stock days than it rises on good days, it usually signals exhaustion, not strength.”
“The current skew in BTC/Nasdaq performance suggests that BTC investors are somewhat jaded and have been for some time.”
