BTC ETFs lose $635 million in a single day. What next?

A key tailwind that supposedly powered bitcoin’s recent rise above $80,000 appears to be fading.

The 11 U.S.-listed spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which pulled in $3.29 billion in investor money through March and April, are now leaking funds. And sizeable ones at that.

On Wednesday, investors yanked $635 million from these funds, the highest single-day net outflow since Jan. 29, according to data source SoSoValue. It wasn’t an isolated event either. Over the past five trading days, the ETFs have bled a total of $1.26 billion, pulling total net inflows since debut in January 2024 down to $58.5 billion from $59.76 billion a week ago.

Bitcoin has stopped rallying. Since last Wednesday, the upswing that carried prices from $65,000 to above $80,000 has stalled, with momentum running out of steam near the 200-day simple moving average positioned just above $82,000. In the past 24 hours, bitcoin has dropped over 2% to $79,400, with analysts attributing the loss to the resurgent inflation fears in the U.S., even though these macro developments have been largely shrugged off by Wall Street’s Nasdaq and S&P 500 equity index. Both these indices hit new highs on Wednesday.

The $635 million outflow is not a number that bulls can easily dismiss, particularly since the strong inflows through March and April were widely hailed as bullish catalysts, and the macro picture is worsening due to rising inflation in the U.S.

“A persistently hot CPI, an incoming Fed under Warsh that markets read as more hawkish, or another oil shock can compress bitcoin even with positive net flows. From our perspective, the more useful question is not whether the markup leg continues, but whether macro conditions stay loose enough for the flows to do their work,” Adam Haeems, head of asset management at Tesseract Group, said. Tesseract has over $500 in assets under management.

Still, it’s worth noting that the relationship between ETF flows and bitcoin is not as straightforward as it once was. A correlation study offers a more data-driven lens on that.

The 90-day rolling Pearson coefficient between bitcoin’s daily percentage return and the daily percentage change in cumulative net ETF inflows currently stands at just 0.16, statistically indistinguishable from zero and down from the peak of 0.68 in February.

In plain terms, knowing the direction in which ETF flows moved on any given day may not offer any cues about BTC’s price action. That said, large redemptions like the one seen on Wednesday still matter.