New data shows that speculative investors who once bet on cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) have moved on to gamble in other areas of the market.
Data from financial research firm Fundstrat Global Advisors shows that speculative investors have migrated to hotter trades this year.
Those hotter trades include everything from pre-IPO companies and prediction markets to crude oil prices and stocks tied to artificial intelligence (A.I.).
The situation is seeing investors pulled in different directions and shifting capital from cryptocurrencies and into new areas, hurting the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH).
Bitcoin’s price has fallen 16% so far in June and is down 51% from its all-time intraday high of $126,272.76 U.S. reached on Oct. 6 of last year.
The question is how does crypto regain its mojo when there is a growing amount of speculative trading options available to investors, including perpetual futures contracts known as “perps.”
Fundstrat says that investors who previously chased crypto are still chasing assets showing upside momentum and using leverage to amplify those bets.
But those bets are increasingly being found on prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket and involve pre-IPO companies such as SpaceX and Anthropic.
The crypto sector is struggling to produce a story powerful enough to compete with A.I., war-driven moves in oil prices, and private companies before their initial public offerings (IPOs).
Fundstrat notes that Bitcoin has underperformed the benchmark S&P 500 index by about 13 percentage points since the Iran war broke out at the end of February and volatile oil prices gave investors something more exciting to wager on.
Bucking the downturn in crypto is Hyperliquid, a crypto-native perpetual-futures exchange that lets people speculate not only on Bitcoin but also on tokenized versions of gold, oil, stocks, and pre-IPO companies.
BTC is currently trading at $62,800 U.S. per share.
