Alternative investment vehicles such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs), led by BlackRock’s IBIT, keep track of bitcoin’s price. It is well known by now.
But another ETF from the betting world has moved in lockstep with bitcoins cycles since 2020 with an interesting pattern that appears to the naked eye to show leading signals for BTC trend changes.
This ETF is the NYSE-listed Roundhill Sports Betting & iGaming ETF (BETZ). The fund debuted in June 2020 and has since attracted only $98 million in net inflows. As of Tuesday, it had about $50 million in assets under management, which is paltry compared to the billions of dollars in the IBIT fund.
The 90-day correlation coefficient between the two assets was 0.73 at press time, according to data from TradingView. Meanwhile, the 365-day coefficient stood at 0.91. This corresponds to an R² of approx. 0.83, which means that over 80% of the variation in the movements of the two assets is statistically related. Talk about moving in lockstep!
But here’s where it gets interesting. If you overlay the ETF price on BTC’s price chart, a clear pattern emerges as the fund tends to hit big peaks and troughs a few weeks before reversals in the bitcoin market.
The blue line represents bitcoin, and the white line, the BETZ ETF.
The betting ETF peaked in September 2021, and when BTC followed suit in November, it was already falling. The ETF’s eventual bottom in September 2022 also preceded bitcoins by three months.
A similar pattern played out last year when the ETF peaked in August, two months ahead of BTC.
While the correlation between the two assets is far from definitive causation, the consistency of these timing shifts across multiple cycles is hard to ignore. It reinforces the broader argument of several leading observers, including Ray Dalio, that bitcoin continues to behave more like a risk-sensitive macro asset than a traditional safe-haven instrument.
For traders, the take-away is clear: the ETF is more like a complementary sentiment and liquidity proxy rather than a stand-alone predictor of BTC trends.
The fact that the BETZ ETF has decoupled from rising BTC prices in recent days may be an early signal worth monitoring, it’s just noise in a relationship that has historically held but is not guaranteed to continue.
