Alternative investment vehicles, such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs), led by BlackRock’s IBIT, dominate the price of bitcoin. That is already well known.
But another ETF in the betting world has moved at the same pace as bitcoin. cycles since 2020, with an interesting pattern that, at first glance, seems to show main signs of BTC trend changes.
That ETF is the Roundhill Sports Betting & iGaming ETF (BETZ) listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The fund debuted in June 2020 and has since attracted just $98 million in net inflows. As of Tuesday, it had approximately $50 million in assets under management, which pales in comparison to the billions of dollars in the IBIT fund.
The 90-day correlation coefficient between the two assets was 0.73 at press time, according to data from TradingView. Meanwhile, the 365-day ratio stood at 0.91. That translates to an R² of approximately 0.83, implying that more than 80% of the variation in the movements of the two assets is statistically linked. Talk about moving in unison!
But this is where it gets interesting. If you overlay the ETF price on the BTC price chart, a clear pattern emerges, in that the fund tends to make major peaks and lows a couple of weeks before changes in the bitcoin market.
The blue line represents bitcoin and the white line, the BETZ ETF.
The Betting ETF peaked in September 2021, and when BTC followed in November, it was already falling. The ETF’s eventual fund in September 2022 also preceded bitcoin’s by three months.
A similar pattern developed last year, when the ETF peaked in August, two months before BTC.
While the correlation between the two assets is far from definitive causation, it is difficult to ignore the consistency of these temporal trade-offs over multiple cycles. It strengthens the broader argument made by several prominent observers, including Ray Dalio, that bitcoin continues to behave more like a risk-sensitive macro asset than a traditional safe haven instrument.
For traders, the conclusion is clear: the ETF is more like a complementary indicator of sentiment and liquidity than an independent predictor of BTC trends.
The fact that the BETZ ETF has decoupled, in recent days, from the rise in BTC prices may be an early signal worth monitoring, it is just noise in a relationship that has historically held but is not guaranteed to persist.
