Since bitcoin's high of $124,753 on 6 Oct 2025, the asset has taken an extremely diverse path from US technology stocks. Bitcoin is down 48%. The Nasdaq-100 is up 18% over the same window. One asset has entered a deep drawdown, while the other has continued to compound.
Bitcoin Has Diverged from Nasdaq, but Not Decoupled
16 July 2026 - 16:00 CEST
The correlation data tells a more nuanced story. Bitcoin has not stopped trading as a risk asset. Measured across the drawdown itself, its daily return correlation with the Nasdaq-100 is 0.49. The two remain exposed to the same broad impulses: liquidity conditions, risk appetite, dollar sensitivity, rates expectations and investor positioning.
Bitcoin has decoupled in performance, not in sensitivity. It is no longer delivering Nasdaq-like returns, but it is still moving with the macro tape.
Correlation has remained firm
The relationship has not weakened as the gap has widened. Across the 194 trading days since the October high, the return correlation is 0.49, and the 90-day rolling measure has not fallen below 0.40 at any point in the drawdown. That is the striking part. Bitcoin has diverged from the Nasdaq-100 by 66 percentage points, while continuing to move with it day to day.
Correlation measures whether two assets move together over short intervals, not whether they end up in the same place. It is a normalized statistic: it deliberately discards the size of the moves. Two assets can co-move on most days and still finish a year in entirely different positions.
To see why, the relationship has to be decomposed rather than correlated.
Chart
Source: Tradingview, Sandmark
The beta is intact, the alpha is not
Regressing bitcoin's daily returns on the Nasdaq-100's over the drawdown gives a beta of 1.11. Bitcoin moves 1.11% for every 1% move in the index. That is the profile of an amplified technology stock, and it is precisely what a risk asset is supposed to look like.
The same regression gives an alpha of -0.43% per day. That is the portion of bitcoin's return the Nasdaq-100 does not explain, and it compounds to roughly -66% over a year.
Split the drawdown into those two components, and the picture is unambiguous. The Nasdaq relationship contributed +20 percentage points to bitcoin's return since October. Bitcoin's own drift contributed -56. Together, they model a 48% decline, against an actual decline of 48%.
The macro relationship has not hurt bitcoin. It has helped. Everything else has overwhelmed it.
The regression also sets the limit on how much the comparison can explain. The Nasdaq-100 accounts for roughly a quarter of the variance in bitcoin's daily returns over this period. Three quarters of what bitcoin does day to day has nothing to do with US technology stocks at all.
Sell-offs are not the mechanism
The intuitive explanation for the gap is asymmetry: that bitcoin falls harder on bad days than it rises on good ones. The data does not support it.
Splitting the same window by the direction of the index, bitcoin's beta on Nasdaq-100 up days is 1.09. On down days it is 1.11. Within noise, the response is symmetric. Bitcoin is not being punished disproportionately when equities fall.
The underperformance is not a reaction to the macrocycle at all. It is a constant idiosyncratic bleed that runs at roughly the same rate whatever the index does. Crypto-specific selling, leverage unwinds and flow reversals are subtracting from the return every day, in rising markets and falling ones alike.
That distinction is significant for anyone sizing the position. An asset with an asymmetric beta is a bet on the macrocycle turning. An asset with a symmetric beta and a negative alpha is not: the cycle turning does not fix it.
Trading with the cycle, not compounding with it
The relationship with the Nasdaq-100 has not disappeared. Bitcoin remains exposed to the same risk-on/risk-off framework it has traded within for years, with a beta slightly above one and a correlation near the upper end of its range.
But unlike previous bullish phases, that exposure has not been rewarded. Bitcoin is carrying the sensitivity of a high-beta technology asset without any of the compounding because a separate and larger force is working against it in the opposite direction.
For now, bitcoin is trading with the macrocycle but failing to compound with it. Until the drift stops, the weakness should be framed as a performance divergence rather than a true decoupling. It should also not be framed as a macro problem. The macro is the only part currently working.
