Nasdaq Crushes Bitcoin with 10x Gains in 2025 — But Wintermute Says BTC Is Still the Ultimate Bet
Wall Street’s darling is stealing the spotlight—for now. While the Nasdaq rockets ahead with 10x the gains of Bitcoin this year, crypto market makers like Wintermute aren’t blinking. Here’s why they’re still all-in on the OG crypto.
### The Short-Term Illusion of Traditional Markets
Sure, tech stocks are flexing this year. But let’s not confuse a liquidity-fueled sugar rush with actual staying power. The Nasdaq’s sprint looks impressive—until you remember it’s running on Fed fumes and corporate buybacks.
### Bitcoin’s Silent Accumulation Phase
Meanwhile, BTC’s “slow” year is a classic setup. Institutions are stacking sats under the radar, exchanges are bleeding supply, and the halving dust hasn’t even settled yet. Wintermute’s betting the real squeeze play hasn’t even started.
### The Punchline? Follow the Smart Money
When crypto’s sharpest market makers ignore short-term noise to back Bitcoin’s structural thesis, it’s time to ask: do you want to chase yesterday’s winners—or position for tomorrow’s? (Spoiler: TradFi always figures it out—two years late and leveraged to the tits.)
Negative Bitcoin-Nasdaq Asymmetry Signals Bottom, Not Breakdown
The correlation between bitcoin and the Nasdaq-100 remains high, around 0.8, but Bitcoin’s behavior this year is far from typical.
Wintermute told investors in a recent market report, highlighting how Bitcoin falls sharply on equity sell-offs but barely rises when the Nasdaq gains.
The team measures this through performance skew, showing how much harder Bitcoin falls on Nasdaq down days than it rises on up days.
Currently, that skew is firmly negative. “Bitcoin still trades like a high-beta reflection of risk sentiment, but only when it’s painful,” Wintermute says.
This asymmetry is slowly compressing over time, reflecting Bitcoin’s evolution as a macro asset, yet the pain gap remains elevated.
On a 365-day rolling basis, the negative skew is the highest since, about a year after Bitcoin peaked during the previous bear market.
Wintermute notes, “Negative asymmetry of this scale usually appears when sentiment is washed out, and historically, it has been a precursor to price recovery.”
The reasons behind Bitcoin lagging Nasdaq by almost 10X are both behavioral and structural.
Wintermute points to a shift in market attention.they explain
Korean retail is all trading Equities.
Crypto offers worst risk reward terms pic.twitter.com/aFFIt1DacH
AI Hype Steals Bitcoin Thunder, But Liquidity Tells Real Story
For much of 2025, the excitement that once drove crypto token launches, infrastructure upgrades, and retail participation has gravitated toward mega-cap tech, especially AI.
This incremental risk appetite has flowed into the Nasdaq rather than digital assets, leaving Bitcoin to act as a.
At the same time, crypto’s liquidity profile is more fragile than in previous cycles.
“Stablecoin issuance has plateaued, ETF inflows have slowed, and market depth across exchanges hasn’t recovered to early-2024 levels,” Wintermute points out.
This fragility amplifies negative reactions when equities correct, keeping BTC’s downside participation mechanically higher than its upside.
Wintermute emphasizes that “Historically, this kind of negative asymmetry doesn’t appear NEAR topsWhen BTC falls harder on bad equity days than it rises on good ones, it usually signals exhaustion, not strength.”
Analysts Converge On BTC Bottom Between $98K-$104k
Despite lagging behind the Nasdaq this year, Bitcoin has held up remarkably well, trading less than 20% off its all-time highs, suggesting that the market’s underlying health is strong.
This aligns with analysis shared by Cryptonews yesterday that seven years’ worth of death cross data shows Bitcoin is close to hitting a structural bottom that could see it shoot to $145K.
Crypto analyst DaanCrypto observed a big liquidity cluster below the local lows at $98K-$100K, which should be taken out soon.
According to his analysis, there’s a local resistance area at ~$108K and If broken, Bitcoin can get back into the bull zone around $112K.
Farzam Ehsani, Co-founder and CEO of VALR, told Cryptonews that Bitcoin holding above $110,000 is vital for it to end the year on a strong note.
According to him, “A decisive reclaim of this range could mark the beginning of a new upside market cycle and open the door for BTC to retest its previous highs and even head higher towards $130,000 before year-end, especially if ETF inflows pick up again.”
