Bitcoin’s sharp pullback from its latest document excessive worn out its year-to-date beneficial properties, and that is led to questions on aggressive value targets for the cryptocurrency into 2026. However as vital as the place bitcoin’s value goes subsequent is a query in regards to the position bitcoin actually serves in a portfolio: When will it persistently behave like a retailer of worth?
“It is nonetheless going to should show itself as that digital retailer worth over an extended time frame,” Nate Geraci, NovaDius Wealth Administration president, stated on the CNBC “ETF Edge” podcast.
For years, bitcoin has been described as “digital gold,” a comparability that may be highly effective and interesting to traders since gold is predicted to guard portfolios in periods of broader market stress, shifting in a fashion uncorrelated to shares and different threat belongings. However for bitcoin, the digital gold narrative is undermined each time it trades like a threat asset throughout fairness selloffs. After two distinct intervals of volatility in 2025, bitcoin hasn’t been capable of present a transparent reply to the digital gold query.
“The monitor document to date is blended,” Geraci stated.
He pointed to the “tariff tantrum” interval of inventory promoting in April after President Trump introduced sweeping world tariffs, a interval of market volatility throughout which bitcoin carried out very effectively. “That caught a number of traders consideration,” he stated.
However extra just lately, as weak spot in expertise shares led the market down, most cryptocurrencies, together with bitcoin, additionally bought off. Bitcoin, particularly, bought off significantly greater than the inventory market, he famous.
“The jury remains to be out,’ Geraci stated.
Bitcoin and Nasdaq 100 efficiency this 12 months.
Geraci confused that over the long-term, he does consider bitcoin is “heading down that path of appearing far more just like the bodily metallic itself.”
However he added that for now, it’s appearing extra like a risky “teenager.”
“It is just 15 to16 years outdated, so nonetheless has to show itself as that digital retailer of worth,” he stated.
Gold, however, has a millennia-long monitor document.
“It is story remains to be in its early chapters,” Geraci wrote in a follow-up e mail to CNBC.
Value of bitcoin and gold year-to-date in 2025.
Geraci stated it’s good to have some perspective throughout any short-term bout of volatility. Whereas bitcoin is down over 25% since its document excessive value in October (from its document excessive to its latest low the loss was a fair steeper 35%), it has greater than doubled in worth since January 2024, when there was an inflow of spot bitcoin ETFs to the market after SEC approvals.
Moreover, whereas spot bitcoin ETFs have seen billions in outflows over the previous month, because the starting of the 12 months, they’ve attracted roughly $22 billion in inflows.
He thinks that whereas the latest bitcoin crash started as a perform of the tech inventory promoting and broader fairness market selloff, leverage within the crypto market in the end performed a big position within the extended decline. “I simply assume there was a number of leverage within the class that wanted to be flushed out,” he stated. “And I believe that is what we’re seeing now.”
Past bitcoin itself, Geraci thinks crypto index ETFs, portfolios that spend money on a basket of digital belongings fairly than monitoring the spot market in any single cryptocurrency, could develop into a far more traders search diversification within the new asset class.
However he additionally thinks bitcoin can be an exception within the crypto market, the place he expects many belongings will proceed to commerce extra like tech shares and traders ought to count on to see them falling proper alongside shares in fairness market drawdowns.
“Setting bitcoin apart, I view most different crypto tokens as threat belongings – a lot nearer to high-growth expertise shares than shops of worth. Their funding case is tied to the way forward for stablecoins, tokenization, and decentralized finance,” Geraci wrote through e mail.
