Bitcoin and Gold Are Now the Same Trade. Which One Is Worth Owning?

Producer prices stayed hot on Thursday morning. Gold, the Nasdaq-100 and bitcoin each fell more than 1%. The 30-year Treasury yield closed at 5.37%. That was its highest close since Treasury resumed selling the bond in 2006.

Three of those four are supposed to move that way on a day like that. Investors buy gold precisely because it should theoretically hold up when the rest of the list doesn’t.

Investors have spent this cycle owning bitcoin and gold as separate insurance policies against the same worry: that governments keep borrowing and paper money keeps losing value. If they respond differently, a portfolio survives being wrong about which works. But that strategy depends on the two moving apart, and over the last six months they have done the opposite. Bitcoin’s correlation with gold and its correlation with the Nasdaq-100 have swapped places.

This issue measures how far that has gone, tests it on the only days a hedge is ever judged on, and works out what it does to a portfolio holding both.

What the Correlation Actually Says

Over the last six months, bitcoin has stopped behaving like a technology stock and started behaving like gold.

To test that, we pulled daily prices for bitcoin, gold and the Nasdaq-100 going back to 2019 and measured how closely each pair moved on the days both markets were open. Bitcoin’s four-month correlation with gold now sits at 0.56, against about 0.22 in March. Its correlation with the Nasdaq-100 went the other way over the same months, from 0.54 to 0.36.

That is the highest reading since our data begins in 2019. The previous peak was set in November 2020. As recently as January, gold rose while bitcoin fell on turmoil in Japan’s bond market.

Bitcoin’s correlation with gold and with the Nasdaq-100 over rolling 90-session windows of about four months, using daily returns at the New York close with gold measured by GLD, January 2024 to September 10, 2026. Source: Unchained analysis of Coinbase and Yahoo Finance data.

Published readings this month start at 0.50, and Bitwise calls the current level the highest in nearly six years. Few of them say whether they were built from daily returns or price levels, over what window, or against which gold contract, and each of those choices can move the answer.

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The post Bitcoin and Gold Are Now the Same Trade. Which One Is Worth Owning? appeared first on Unchained.