by Sidhartha Shukla
President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to put the US at the center of the digital-asset industry is reshaping the crypto market.
His march to the White House has lifted Bitcoin to a record high, opened up the widest performance gap to gold since 2022 and sparked unprecedented trading volumes at the world’s largest fund for the token.
The digital asset consolidated near $74,800 as of 7:30 a.m. Thursday in London after hitting an all-time peak of $76,475 a day earlier. The charts below capture some of the landmark crypto changes triggered by Trump’s US election victory.
BlackRock Inc.’s $33 billion iShares Bitcoin Trust exchange-traded fund, the largest fund investing in the token, posted record trading volume of $4.1 billion on Wednesday. The group of 12 US Bitcoin ETFs overall achieved $622 million of daily net inflows, among the highest since the products went live in January.
Gold slumped on Wednesday, trailing its putative digital alternative Bitcoin by the most in over two years. Bullion investors took fright at the prospect of a rise in inflation, Treasury yields and the dollar under Trump’s domestic growth agenda. Clearer US crypto rules may lead some to prefer Bitcoin over gold, according to Noelle Acheson, author of the Crypto Is Macro Now newsletter.
Bitcoin and stocks were both swept higher courtesy of Trump’s support of crypto and pro-business leanings. That’s lifted a 60-day correlation coefficient for the token and MSCI Inc.’s global equity index to 0.66, a relatively rare level in the past five years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A reading of 1 indicates assets are moving in lockstep, while minus 1 signals an inverse tie.
Expectations for Bitcoin volatility are cooling following its record rally. A 30-day gauge of implied swings in the token just suffered its second-biggest drop, based on data compiled by Bloomberg going back a year. The index collated by CF Benchmarks Ltd. is derived from CME Group Bitcoin options pricing. “As markets got further clarity on the election, volatility also trended significantly lower,” FalconX Head of Research David Lawant wrote in a note.
A technical study of Bitcoin using Bollinger Bands sounds a note of caution as the token breached its upper band — a possible sign of stretched momentum. During the past year, Bitcoin rose less than 0.5% on average over the subsequent 20 days after climbing above the upper band, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Copyright Bloomberg News
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