29 Jun 2023
BTC strength concentrated to U.S. hours
BTC has seen staircase gains over the past week, tending to push higher during U.S. market hours and stabilizing as the U.S. market closes.
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This is not atypical behavior for BTC, but it’s worth noting in a regime where BTC’s correlation to major U.S. asset indices such as Nasdaq and the S&P 500 has reached negative levels for the first time since January 2021. This illustrates that U.S. traders are allocating in BTC due to idiosyncratic reasons. Since the November bottom, BTC has seen a 30% gain during U.S. market hours (on June 14, the U.S. market hour return sat at 12%), whereas BTC has seen 21% gains during the Asian session and 17% during the European session. U.S. market hours are now the strongest market hours for BTC since the November bottom, after recovering from a challenging period between mid-Feb to mid-June. As illustrated in below, BTC’s daily trading volume was also highly concentrated in U.S. market hours over the past week, with 50% of the weekly trading volume occurring during the U.S. trading session.
