Bitcoin Is Lower Than It Was in July While the Stock Index Hit a Record

Bitcoin closed the week at 62,680.69 dollars, down 1.53 percent on Friday. On the 30th of July it was at 64,838. In the two and a half weeks between those two prices the S&P 500 cleared 7,800 for the first time, the Russell 2000 set a record, and September Fed hike odds fell from 68 percent to 46. Bitcoin went down through all of it.

That is a meaningful failure of the usual story. The argument for the last two years has been that bitcoin is a high-beta liquidity asset, so falling rate expectations and rising equity indices ought to carry it higher. This time the correlation simply did not hold, and it failed to hold through exactly the set of conditions the thesis says should be most favourable to it.

The flow data offers part of the reason. Spot bitcoin ETFs have been leaking, with a third consecutive outflow day on the 27th of July and a combined 465.3 million dollars out on the 23rd and 24th, BlackRock's IBIT accounting for roughly 415 million of that. Net outflows for the year are running near 4.8 billion. Ether funds have been taking money in over the same stretch.

Then the regulatory catalyst went away. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on the 23rd of July that the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act would not reach the floor before the recess that began on the 7th of August. Polymarket odds on 2026 passage fell to 28 percent from 82 in February. September brings appropriations fights and a midterm campaign, so the calendar gets worse rather than better.

What crypto did get was a strange kind of validation from the equity side. Riot Platforms, a bitcoin miner, jumped 25 percent after hours on the 10th of August after signing a 9.1 billion dollar data centre agreement with Anthropic. The market paid up for a miner's grid connection while marking down the asset it was built to mine.

So the sector is being taken apart and revalued in pieces. The infrastructure is worth considerably more than it was and the token is worth less. Bitcoin is down about 46 percent over twelve months and has spent the summer trading as a rates proxy rather than on anything native to it. An index at a record and a coin below its July level in the same fortnight is the clearest statement yet that these have stopped being the same trade.