Understanding ‘Negative Skew’: Why It’s Troubling Bitcoin Bulls — and Why It May Hint at a Near-Term Bottom

If it feels like bitcoin drops harder when stocks fall but barely benefits when equities rally, that’s because it largely does — and the pattern has become increasingly clear.

For several months, bitcoin has shown an uneven relationship with the Nasdaq 100: tightly linked when the index moves lower, yet largely disconnected when it moves higher. This week offered another example. The Nasdaq slid 2% on Thursday, and bitcoin tumbled twice as steeply. But when tech stocks regained some ground on Friday, bitcoin lagged far behind.

With roughly six weeks left in 2025, the Nasdaq 100 has climbed 20% year-to-date. Bitcoin, meanwhile, has managed only a modest 3% gain.

A Story of Asymmetry, Not Decorrelation

Wintermute analyst Jasper De Maere argues this isn’t about bitcoin losing its connection to tech stocks. In fact, the correlation between bitcoin and the Nasdaq remains elevated at around 0.8. Instead, the real issue is asymmetry — the way bitcoin reacts differently to rising versus falling markets.

“This isn’t a breakdown of correlation, but a reflection of asymmetry, the uneven way BTC responds to risk,” he said. “When equities rally, BTC’s reaction is muted. When they sell off, BTC tends to move more sharply in the same direction.”

De Maere uses “performance skew” to quantify this. Positive skew reflects bitcoin outperforming when markets are risk-on, while negative skew shows it lagging in risk-off conditions.

And that skew has been firmly negative for an extended period. De Maere’s analysis of the percentage of days — on a rolling 365-day basis — where bitcoin showed positive skew versus the Nasdaq reveals a drop to levels last seen near the 2022 bear-market lows.

Why the weakness? De Maere points to a loss of attention and enthusiasm for bitcoin as speculative appetite is being absorbed by the equity market. Liquidity challenges are also weighing on performance, with ETF inflows slowing, stablecoin issuance stagnating, and exchange market depth still trailing early-2024 levels.

A Potentially Bullish Contrarian Signal

Even so, there may be a silver lining. Historically, this type of deep negative skew has tended to appear near market bottoms — not tops.

“Negative asymmetry like this doesn’t show up near peaks,” De Maere noted. “When BTC drops harder on bad equity days than it rises on good ones, it usually signals exhaustion, not strength.”

His takeaway: the persistent BTC–Nasdaq skew suggests that investors are worn out — a pattern that often precedes major turning points in bitcoin’s market cycle.

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