Hi everyone,
I have been reading a lot about correlation between stock market and crypto. As we have seen in recent months, when the stock market crashes, BTC follows.
Thanks
No we definitely have not seen that.
Anytime I've seen people claim that they're like: "look the stock market went down today and bitcoin went down too, they are totally correlated!!" And then like two days later one will go up while the other goes down or doesn't move. One day going down at the same time does not make them correlated. Cherry picking coincidences does not equal correlation.
So far we have not seen any correlation between the two markets so it is impossible to tell what would happen to Bitcoin's price when the stock market starts going down, which looks likely in the next two years.
Three possible scenarios in order of how likely I think they are:
1. Bitcoin may just continue to exhibit no correlation to the traditional markets as it has done throughout its lifetime to the present.
2. People could flee stocks which are at the top of the market and go into Bitcoin since its at the bottom of the market, not to mention since it is a capped currency, with over the long term exploding adoption. That would be the sensible choice.
3. People might just flee into cash away from any investments, especially one they view as high risk like bitcoin.
The reason I rank them in that order is because you have to realize that bitcoin is MUCH smaller than the stock market in terms of participation. Most people who are in the stock market are not in Bitcoin, especially now after the crash. Most people in stocks have never bought bitcoin and likely a very sizeable amount of people in bitcoin aren't in the stock market to any reasonable degree (20-something year olds - studies have shown many young people today would rather buy bitcoin than stocks, so a lot of the people buying bitcoin probably have no stocks or very little) and many of the people who are in both got out of bitcoin over the last year during the crash. Meaning that people who are dropping stock are not gonna be dropping Bitcoin, because they don't have bitcoin. This alone makes #1 and #2 more likely and #3 unlikely. Meanwhile, because of this probably some of those people who are dropping stocks and aren't in bitcoin will pick up bitcoin, most of them won't, but some of them will, which makes #2 more likely. It's possible though that the people who have both and drop both balances out the people who only have stocks and drop them and pick up bitcoin to grow their money while stocks are tanking, in which case #1 would happen and bitcoin would overall just not really be affected by a stock crash.
I don't think bitcoin is large enough or accepted enough yet to have a gold-like "hedge against the economy" boom, so I think #2 will be limited as I don't see suddenly tens of millions of people realizing they should put their sold stock money into Bitcoin which is solid money like gold, maybe in another 10 years from now on the next stock crash but I don't think enough people believe in bitcoin now for that to happen. Which leaves #1 as the most likely - bitcoin will for the most part just continue its own market cycle and will be in a bull market the next couple years booming again in 2021 or 2022.
No matter what happens you don't need to worry. One thing assured is that in a few years bitcoin will be many times more valuable than it is now, whether or not a stock crash affects the bitcoin market cycle or not.