Alternative investment vehicles such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs), led by BlackRock’s IBIT, have an influence on the price of bitcoin. It is well known now.
But another ETF in the betting world has moved at the same pace as Bitcoin. cycles since 2020, with an interesting trend that, to the naked eye, appears to show leading signals for BTC trend changes.
This ETF is the Roundhill Sports Betting & iGaming ETF (BETZ), listed on the NYSE. The fund debuted in June 2020 and has since attracted just $98 million in net inflows. As of Tuesday, it had about $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 TradingView data. The coefficient over 365 days amounts to 0.91. This 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 related. Talk about moving at the same time!
But this is where it gets interesting. If you overlay the ETF price on the BTC price chart, a clear trend appears, as the fund tends to make significant highs and lows a few weeks before Bitcoin market reversals.
The blue line represents bitcoin and the white line represents the BETZ ETF.
The betting ETF peaked in September 2021, and by the time BTC followed in November, it was already in decline. The ETF’s eventual September 2022 bottom also preceded Bitcoin’s by three months.
A similar pattern occurred last year, when the ETF peaked in August, two months before BTC.
While the correlation between the two assets is far from definitive causation, the consistency of these time lags across multiple cycles is hard to ignore. This reinforces 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 result is clear: the ETF looks more like a complementary proxy for sentiment and liquidity than a standalone predictor of BTC trends.
The fact that the BETZ ETF has, in recent days, decoupled 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 whose persistence is not guaranteed.
