Bitcoin Believers Are Back to Watching Stocks After Crypto Crash

tech.hindustantimes.com:

After a gut-wrenching bout of turbulence and existential angst, digital-asset investors are back to focusing on the mood of the US stock market as a gauge of whether the worst might be over.

Stocks are mostly up over the last few weeks and so is Bitcoin, which has added 15% over the past month. The 90-day correlation coefficient of Bitcoin and the S&P 500, after weakening slightly in June, now stands around 0.65 once again, among the highest such readings in Bloomberg data going back to 2010. A coefficient of 1 means the assets are moving in lockstep, while minus-1 would show they're moving in opposite directions.

Cryptocurrencies are poised for outperformance “if equities have bottomed,” said Mike McGlone, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “There are few more powerful forces in markets than when the stock market drops at high velocity as in the first half. Cryptos are part of that ebbing tide.”

That's been the refrain all year, with both stocks and crypto moving in similar fashion. The background is a hawkish Federal Reserve that's bent on tamping down four-decade-high inflation, something that's been the source of volatility for all manner of assets in 2022.

But whether equities and crypto have reached their lows is a question no one can call with any real certainty -- bottoms are only perceptible after the fact, and it's possible both revisit their lows later this year or even early next year.

Bitcoin active addresses are firmly within “a well-defined downtrend channel,” according to analysts at Glassnode, a crypto researcher. They added that network activity “suggests that there remains little influx of new demand as yet.” But at the same time, transactional demand has traded sideways or lower in recent