Bitcoin and Rising Yields Lead as Oil Exhausts Itself

Bearish oil and gold, mildly bullish Bitcoin

Oil ran nearly 60% in two months and is now showing the classic signs of a move that's run out of steam — violent daily swings, sellers reasserting after brief bounces, and a key psychological price level being tested. Gold is a trickier story: it's quietly lost about 11% from its March peak, and it's stopped behaving like a safe haven — it's moving in lockstep with stocks now, which makes it less useful as a hedge. Bitcoin, by contrast, is just quietly grinding higher with no red flags.

Strongly bullish Bitcoin and yields, avoid DOW

Bitcoin is hitting 90-day highs with short-term momentum running well ahead of the longer-term trend — that's a healthy, persistent uptrend. The DOW is the clearest avoid in the portfolio: every model I run points lower, and stagflation environments have historically been brutal for the kind of industrial, earnings-sensitive companies that dominate that index. On oil, I'm actually less bearish than my colleagues — the volatility is so extreme right now that I think high conviction in either direction is a mistake.

Bullish yields and Bitcoin, cautious on everything else

The most important macro signal today is that oil's surge is feeding directly into inflation expectations, and bond yields are reflecting that — they've climbed about 45 basis points from their recent low and are still trending up. Bitcoin is interesting because it's actually decoupling from stocks right now, which is unusual and suggests it may be starting to trade more like an alternative store of value in this environment. Gold, meanwhile, has lost its hedging properties for now — it's moving with stocks, not against them, so it's not doing the job you'd want it to do.

Trim sizes, trust the yield and Bitcoin signals most

The cleanest call in the whole portfolio today is rising yields — all three analysts agree, and the analyst who tracks this most closely has been right on it four times in a row. Bitcoin is the second-cleanest, though I'm keeping the position a bit smaller than some colleagues suggested because past accuracy on Bitcoin specifically has been uneven. On oil, I'm nervous: one of our analysts has been wrong on bearish oil calls every single time historically, so even though the exhaustion story makes intuitive sense, I'm keeping that bet small.