Markets
What to know:
- The Roundhill Sports Betting & iGaming ETF (BETZ), a chap with a name as long as my aunt’s guest list, has shown a robust positive tango with bitcoin, boasting a 365-day correlation coefficient of 0.91. One might say they are chums who walk in step, even if the step is a tad jittery.
- Historically, BETZ has a habit of peaking and sinking a few weeks before bitcoin, with notable curtain calls around the 2021 peak and the 2022 trough, and, if one is feeling theatrical, a cameo in 2025 as well.
- The BETZ-BTC romance reinforces the notion that bitcoin is a risk-sensitive macro asset rather than a safe harbour. In short: it enjoys a good flutter, not a quiet spa day.
Alternative investment vehicles such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs), led by BlackRock’s IBIT, wield considerable influence over bitcoin’s price. That old truth has the staying power of a well-worn whistling kettle.
But another ETF from the betting world has been moving in lockstep with bitcoin’s cycles since 2020, with a pattern so obvious that even a novice could notice the signals for BTC trend changes, provided one squints and pretends not to notice the odds.
That ETF is the NYSE-listed Roundhill Sports Betting & iGaming ETF (BETZ). The fund debuted in June 2020 and has since attracted only $98 million in net inflows. As of Tuesday, it had roughly $50 million in assets under management, which reads as a tiny theatre compared to the roaring audience of the IBIT.
The 90-day correlation coefficient between the two assets was 0.73 at press time, according to data from TradingView. Meanwhile, the 365-day coefficient stood at 0.91. That translates into an R² of approximately 0.83, implying that over 80% of the variation in the two assets’ movements is statistically linked. Talk about a duo that moves in as if they shared a single pair of long trousers!
But here’s the juicy bit. If you overlay the ETF price on BTC’s price chart, a clear pattern emerges: the fund tends to hit major peaks and bottoms a couple of weeks ahead of bitcoin market turnarounds.
The blue line represents bitcoin, and the white line, the BETZ ETF.
The betting ETF peaked in September 2021, and by the time BTC followed in November, it was already declining. The ETF’s eventual bottom in September 2022 also preceded bitcoin’s by three months.
A similar pattern played out last year, when the ETF peaked in August, two months before BTC.
While the correlation between the two assets is far from a proven causation, the consistency of these timing offsets across several cycles is hard to ignore. It lends some heft to the broader contention, advanced by luminaries like Ray Dalio, that bitcoin behaves more like a risk-sensitive macro asset than a traditional safe-haven vehicle.
For traders, the takeaway is plain: BETZ is better viewed as a sentiment and liquidity proxy than a standalone forecast of BTC trends. The ball is in the gift-wrap of probability, not a crystal ball. And if BETZ has recently decoupled from rising BTC prices, consider it a polite nibble of noise in a relationship that has historically held, but not guaranteed to persist.
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2026-05-12 13:32