📉 Bitcoin loses entire “Trump bump”

So much for Trump’s bitcoin bump: the cryptocurrency dipped below $74,000 on Tuesday, its lowest level since Donald Trump won the 2024 US presidential election on November 6, and an over $50,000 drop from its all-time high on October 6, 2025. But following that peak, the asset ended October down, and bitcoin hasn’t ended a month in the green since. 

Is this a correction or something… more chilling? We think Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “This is not a ‘bull market correction’ or ‘a dip.’ It is a full-bore, 2022-like, Leonardo-DiCaprio-in-The-Revenant-style crypto winter.”

How did we get here? What happened to the “crypto president” taking us all to the moon?

• Hougan posits it was “set into motion by factors ranging from excess leverage to widespread profit-taking by OGs.”

• Bitfinex analysts said that the broader flows picture suggests a clear risk-off rotation, with investors reallocating toward cash and gold amid rising uncertainty. “In this environment, the lack of ETF absorption has amplified downside volatility, reinforcing the importance of institutional spot demand as a stabilizing force during periods of market stress,” they said.

• Glassnode analysts agree, writing, “Overall, conditions have shifted into a clear risk-off regime across spot, derivatives, ETFs, and on-chain indicators.” 

It’s not just bitcoin: the broader crypto ecosystem is suffering. The overall crypto market cap now stands at $2.6 trillion, but before the October 10 liquidation event, it had soared above $4 trillion.

The Takeaway

Bernstein analyst Gautam Chhugani sees a light at the end of a tunnel, but he warns it’ll likely get worse before it gets better. He anticipates a reversal most likely in the first half of 2026, after bitcoin bottoms out “around its last cycle highs ~60K range.” The good news for bitcoin bulls is that Chhugani predicts following that bottom, the asset will enter its “sovereign cycle,” while Ray Youssef, CEO of crypto app NoOnes, said earlier this week that bitcoin’s potential downside is in the $69,000 to $71,000 range, pointing to the crypto president’s decisions “in both domestic and foreign policy… acting as a key downside catalyst.”

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AMD, the No. 2 chipmaker in the GPU business, released better-than-expected fourth-quarter results with an outlook to match, but those weren’t enough to impress investors.

• The company had a good quarter, with revenues of $10.27 billion (beating the consensus estimate of $9.65 billion) and solid expectations for the current quarter: management expects revenues of $9.8 billion, give or take $300 million, more than estimates of $9.4 billion.

• That revenue guidance for Q1 includes $100 million in sales of MI308 chips to China, as the chip designer was once again able to send some of its AI processors to buyers in the world’s second-largest economy.

• In Q4, AMD generated $390 million from sales of these chips to China. Without those revenues, sales would have been a lot closer to the consensus estimate.

The knee-jerk reaction for shares is lower, off nearly 7% in after-hours trading.

The Takeaway

Earlier in earnings season, Intel — AMD’s rival in CPUs — said supply constraints were weighing on its outlook, seemingly giving AMD an opportunity to grow market share. During the firm’s analyst day in Q4, CEO Lisa Su said the company could post compounded annual revenue growth of over 35% for the next three to five years, with growth above 60% in its data center business.

But, of course, it’s the longevity and magnitude of the AI boom and how big a piece of the pie AMD can grab that will ultimately determine the success of the shares in the medium term.

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Yesterday, Elon Musk announced that his space company, SpaceX, was acquiring his AI company, xAI. The vision for the newly merged company, expected to go public this year, sounds a lot like Musk’s other public company, Tesla. Both have grand missions and unlikely goals, among many other things that lead Sherwood News’ Rani Molla to the same theory as Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives: the next Musk merger will be between his space company and his company that once sent a vehicle to space. 

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• 🥌 Olympics: We are rapidly coming up on the Milano Cortina Olympics, and the world’s eyes will turn to one sport. Chess on Ice. The Roaring Game. We refer, of course, to curling. Among the men’s squads, Great Britain is entering the games with a 42% chance of taking gold, according to prediction markets,* followed by Canada with a 29% chance and Switzerland with an 11% shot. For the women, Canada is a strong favorite, with a 59% chance of victory.

• 📺 Netflix: Yesterday saw representatives from Netflix hauled in front of Congress as their proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery is vetted by the Hill. It didn’t make much of a difference, it seems: Netflix has had a steady 60% chance of scoring WBD for weeks now, and didn’t move on the news.

• 💸 Crypto: As crypto reels from the ongoing sell-off, a recovery to prices seen as recently as three months ago is seen to be far off. Prediction markets put it at a mere 22% chance that bitcoin crosses $100,000 by the end of May, and just a 34% chance it returns to that price level by the end of July.

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

Earnings expected from Alphabet, Eli Lilly, AbbVie, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Uber, Snap, Qualcomm, Arm Holdings, e.l.f. Beauty, UBS, and CME Group