Bitcoin and covariance

Bitcoin and stocks bottomed at almost exactly the same moment.  This is bad for Bitcoin.  Part of Bitcoin’s appeal is that it is weird, and perhaps does not covary with  standard financial assets in traditional ways.  But at least yesterday it did, and that should be a force pushing Bitcoin lower.

Addendum from DB in the comments:

Matt Levine from yesterday: “Bloomberg tells me that Bitcoin’s daily correlation with the S&P 500 Index was 0.047 in 2017, -0.049 in 2016, 0.07 in 2015 and -0.081 in 2014. That is about as uncorrelated an asset as you could ask for — and a lot of Bitcoin buyers were asking for uncorrelated assets. So far in 2018 the correlation is 0.286. Still pretty uncorrelated! But … less so. When Bitcoin was a weird alternate-currency dream of anarchists, there was no reason for it to be correlated with stocks. When it is just an asset class that regular people trade, buying when they feel confident and selling when they feel nervous, that correlation ticks up.”

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