Bitcoin Funds Drop $319 Million as Investors Line Up to Short

Investors were quick to pull cash out of Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) last week as the number of people betting on the price of the biggest digital coin to drop soared. 

A total of $319 million exited funds from Fidelity, ARK Invest, and other Wall Street heavyweights that give investors exposure to Bitcoin, a Monday report by asset manager CoinShares said. It added that short Bitcoin investment products (that is, products used to bet that the price of Bitcoin will go down) received $4.4 million—the highest number since March. 

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and leading Bitcoin ETF issuer, was the lone fund manager to buck the trend, with inflows of more than $219 million to its iShares ETF for the week.

CoinShares, which itself saw $4 million leave its Bitcoin funds last week, said the reason for the largely negative sentiment was strong economic data coming out of the U.S. “We believe this was driven by stronger-than-expected economic data in the U.S., which has diminished the likelihood of a 50-basis point interest rate cut,” the report read. 

It added that cryptocurrencies in general will become “increasingly sensitive” to interest rate expectations.

Investors have been waiting for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates since the central bank hiked them to a two-decade high in 2022. 

It is now expected that the Federal Reserve will lower them this month after the central bank’s Chair Jerome Powell said in August that policy change was imminent. 

Crypto markets—along with U.S. equities—are “risk-on” assets, meaning they are more prone to price swings than other investments. A high-interest rate environment can make them less appealing to investors as holding cash in safer, yield-bearing accounts becomes preferable.

On Friday, the Commerce Department reported that the personal consumption expenditures price index rose 0.2% over the month and by 2.5% from the same period last year—as expected by analysts. But markets across the board interpreted the data as less likely to spur the Fed towards a quarter percentage point interest rate cut rather than a half-point one.  

Today’s CoinShares report added that investors in Europe also cashed out of crypto funds. Investment vehicles giving exposure to Ethereum, the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, also lost a total $5.7 million. Ethereum ETFs in the U.S. were approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission back in May. 

The price of Bitcoin currently stands at $58,622 per coin after having dropped by more than 7% over seven days, CoinGecko data shows. The asset is 20% below its all-time high of $73,737 it touched back in March following the long-awaited approval of Bitcoin ETFs in the U.S. market.