For all the focus on bitcoin’s order flow, the event that decides the next move might just be sitting in equities.
Major market-maker Wintermute said in a Tuesday note that a catalyst for bitcoin and the broader crypto market is SpaceX’s stock market debut on June 12.
The listing is gauge of retail and risk appetite. If investors absorb the deal well, it reads as a good sign for crypto. Wintermute said, that points to exhaustion across risk assets and would be bearish for the whole complex.
Wintermute said last week’s drop was about a missing bid, not Strategy’s bitcoin sale.
On its over-the-counter desk, where large trades happen off exchanges, retail had been selling for a while and moving into stocks. US institutions were offloading the bitcoin they bought a month ago.
Wintermute added some of the recent selling in AI stocks looks like investors raising cash for a run of huge IPOs, with SpaceX first. The money going into those deals has to come from somewhere, and right now some of it is leaving crypto and tech.
There is also no chart to lean on, however. Bitcoin never traded much between $50,000 and $59,000 on the way up in 2024, so there are no real support levels underneath.
Bitcoin traded near $63,000 on Tuesday, according to CoinDesk data, down about 14% over the past week. SpaceX prices on June 11 and begins trading the next day.