Roundup 4/24/25: The Ultimate Risk-Off Asset
Brian Cubellis | Chief Strategy Officer
Apr 24, 2025
The Ultimate Risk-Off Asset
Since the April 2nd tariff shock kicked off a rolling trade war, asset correlations have been rewired. Long-dated government debt and global equities have lurched lower, while gold and bitcoin have surged higher.
This divergence underscores a point markets are only beginning to price: bitcoin neutralizes (or at least minimizes) key risks every legacy "save haven" still carries—debasement, dilution, seizure, and centralized mismanagement.
Since bitcoin’s inception, its architecture has delivered near-perfect uptime, zero successful protocol-level hacks, and a market cap that has compounded far faster than any traditional haven.
Long-Term Trend: Bitcoin’s 10-year compound annual growth rate is roughly ~65% despite several ~70% drawdowns.
Correlation Drift: Short-run correlations with equities (risk assets) spike during liquidity shocks, then mean-revert toward low or even negative levels over longer term timeframes, particularly as trust in forms of "inside money" (fiat currencies, bonds, equities) continues to erode.
Institutional Adoption: Corporate treasuries and sovereign entities (Strategy, GameStop, SoftBank, U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, Gulf sovereign-wealth funds) accumulating bitcoin signals increasing formal recognition.
Gold’s Surge Is the Canary
Gold’s blistering run (~$22 trillion market cap) signals demand for assets that no government can print or control. Bitcoin offers the same monetary neutrality but adds portability, auditability, and an unforgeable supply schedule. At ~$2 trillion in market cap, bitcoin trades at barely 1/10th of gold’s capitalization.
$900 Trillion of Global Assets Still Mispriced
The world’s balance-sheet is roughly $900 trillion—real estate, equities, bonds, sovereign cash, gold, art, and collectibles. All carry some combination of the aforementioned legacy risk factors. As portfolios discover bitcoin’s superior risk-off profile, capital need not abandon gold; both can rise in tandem while flows leave more vulnerable buckets: over-levered property, long-duration sovereign bonds with negative real returns, and over-valued equities subject to competitive forces.
The Road Ahead
Volatility ≠ Risk: price swings will persist, but the structural hazards bitcoin mitigates remain embedded in legacy assets.
Regulatory Arc: from ban-scare to strategic-reserve status in a decade; legitimacy is trending one way.
Multipolar Finance: capital-control episodes and tariff warfare elevate censorship-resistant reserves from “speculative” to strategic.
Bitcoin is more scarce than gold, digitally portable like information, and answerable to no sovereign. Calling it “high-risk” is outdated thinking. In a 21st-century landscape defined by geopolitical fragmentation and institutional distrust, bitcoin increasingly looks like the risk-off asset of last resort.
Chart of the Week
"Bitcoin’s ten-day realized volatility is less than S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100…"
Quote of the Week
"You need to understand why Bitcoin and gold are both up ~70% in the past 14 months. And why the Nasdaq is flat despite the unfolding AI and robotics revolution, the dollar is crashing, and long term US treasuries continue to lose value.
The writing has been on the wall since 2020. The meme stocks and shitcoins were a distraction. Bitcoin and gold - hard money without counter-party risk - has been the most important investment thesis to understand this decade.
The global monetary order is rapidly changing. And the status quo is dead. There's still time to allocate to hard money and protect your capital. But the charts are starting to scream.
We will soon reach a tipping point when the average investor understands the precise reason that Gold and Bitcoin are outperforming everything else so dramatically. When the average person understands what Bitcoiners, gold bugs, and gold-stacking central bankers have understood for years now...
There's going to be a race to allocate to hard money without counter-party risk. Gold will continue to pump based on its reputation and enormous liquidity. But Bitcoin will continue to gain the most in percentage terms.
Equity index funds were an innovation that took a while to catch on. But once they did, every Joe Blow with a 401(k) was blindly allocating a percentage of their paycheck into them. The same will happen with Bitcoin.
I'll repeat: It's not a coincidence that Larry Fink managed to roll out the Bitcoin ETF when he did. There's a wave of capital coming. And it has barely even started."
Podcasts of the Week
Still Early: Bitcoin’s Mispricing, ETF Flows, & the Quiet Race to Accumulate
In this episode of The Last Trade, hosts Jackson Mikalic, Michael Tanguma, Brian Cubellis, Tim Kotzman & Bram Kanstein discuss bitcoin’s unique asymmetry, trade war volatility & tailwinds, Bessent’s toolkit & Powell’s hot seat, global monetary reordering, analog versus digital sound money, Early Riders' launch of The Guild network & more!
Incentives Rewired: Bitcoin’s Role in Reshaping Real Estate
In this episode of Final Settlement, we're joined by Leon Wankum & Kelly Lannan for a masterclass on the convergence of bitcoin and real estate. We discuss real estate’s monetary premium erosion, the consequences of monetary inflation, bitcoin as pristine collateral, development projects infused with bitcoin, structured credit instruments, bitcoin urbanism & more!
Closing Note
Onramp provides bitcoin financial services built on multi-institution custody. To learn more about our products for individuals and institutions, schedule a consultation to chat with us about your situation and needs.
Until next week,
Brian Cubellis