The crypto sector remains deeply out of favor, not only from a price perspective, but also in terms of investor sentiment.
Capital flows and market attention have increasingly shifted to other high-growth sectors, most recently semiconductors and memory-related stocks, which have effectively replaced crypto as the market’s dominant dynamic trade.
This analysis compares the performance cycles of Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization; gold, the greatest precious metal; NVIDIA (NVDA), the leader in AI-driven stocks; and memory and semiconductor names including SanDisk (SNDK) and Micron Technology (MU).
Bitcoin saw a huge rebound from its November 2022 low to its October 2025 high, rising over 650% from around $15,000 to almost $125,000. A significant portion of this development occurred between September 2024 and January 2025, when the price doubled from around $55,000 to $110,000 in conjunction with Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory. The price finally surpassed $126,000 last October.
Gold has followed a delayed but similar trajectory, largely driven by the growing “depreciation trade” narrative surrounding budget deficits and monetary expansion. The metal began its breakout in early 2024 at nearly $2,000 per ounce and eventually climbed above $5,200 per ounce in February 2026, about four months after bitcoin peaked. Since then, gold has corrected by almost 20% and is now trading below $4,400 per ounce.
NVIDIA followed a similar trend, peaking near $225 per share in May before dropping back to $212, and has been only slightly higher over the past six months.
Hot money trading has now shifted decisively towards memory and semiconductor companies such as Sandisk and Micron Technology, with Micron recently entering the $1 trillion market cap club after being valued at just $70 billion only a year ago.
As SpaceX approaches potentially the largest IPO in history, and OpenAI and Anthropic could soon follow, investor attention could shift again. Much like crypto, gold, and AI infrastructure before them, these companies could become the next major destination for hot money and hot money, potentially defining the next phase of the market cycle.
With investors about to get a shiny new object to focus their attention and money on, bitcoin and crypto could be kept out of the bull runs for much longer than expected.
