Bitcoin ETF posts record outflow amid crypto bear market

By Christine Idzelis

Bitcoin has a 'very low correlation' with a popular gold ETF this year, says CFRA's Aniket Ullal

The iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF has tumbled in November.

The biggest bitcoin exchange-traded fund in the U.S. is in a slump after investors bailed from the ETF like never before, as the cryptocurrency struggles in a bear market.

Investors pulled $1.6 billion from the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF IBIT from Oct. 30 through Nov. 17, including a record daily outflow of about $447 million on Monday, said Aniket Ullal, head of ETF research and analytics at CFRA Research, in a phone interview.

Those outflows began the day after the Federal Reserve concluded its policy meeting on Oct. 29 with Fed Chair Jerome Powell's message that another interest-rate cut this year was not a foregone conclusion, according to Ullal. "Before that we had pretty steady inflows," he said.

The iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, which launched in January 2024, is a proxy for exchange-traded funds tracking the spot prices of bitcoin as it is the largest among them, according to Ullal. The iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, which has around $75 billion of assets under management, is down year to date after tumbling around 20% over the past three months, according to FactSet data.

Bitcoin ETFs have "behaved much more like a risk-on asset than a store-of- value asset," tending to move a lot with rates and tech stocks, said Ullal. Also, bitcoin is much more volatile than the S&P 500 SPX when looking at daily price swings, he cautioned.

Digital gold?

Based on Ullal's calculations, the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF appears more correlated this year with the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF IVV and the Invesco QQQ Trust Series I QQQ, an ETF tracking the technology-heavy Nasdaq-100 index, than the SPDR Gold Shares ETF GLD.

That's despite some investors viewing bitcoin as "digital gold" and a store of value, according to Ullal. So far in 2025, he found that the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF has "a very low correlation" with the SPDR Gold Shares, which provides exposure to the yellow metal.

Meanwhile, the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF is down 0.7% this year through Tuesday, while the SPDR Gold Shares ETF has surged 54.6% over the same period, FactSet data shows.

Still, the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF remains above its low this year, touched on April 8 amid tariff fears and recovering as risk appetite returned to the U.S. stock market, said Ullal. April 8 was also the closing low in 2025 for the S&P 500, which has seen a big rebound since then, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Bitcoin prices (BTCUSD) rose Tuesday, but as of 4 p.m. Eastern the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index (BTCUSD) was 26.5% below its 52-week peak on Oct. 6, remaining mired in a bear market, according to Dow Jones Market Data. A drop of at least 20% indicates bear territory.

The iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF rose 1.1% on Tuesday, snapping five straight days of declines, according to FactSet data. The fund remained deep in the red so far this month, with a slide of 15.5% in November through Tuesday.

-Christine Idzelis

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11-18-25 1911ET