Shifting expectations around Fed policy have repeatedly redirected capital between crypto, commodities, and technology stocks.

Kevin Warsh’s arrival at the Federal Reserve, renewed geopolitical tensions, and the AI investment boom have pushed stocks, gold, and Bitcoin onto sharply different paths this year, according to a new report from crypto trading firm BIT.

The report argues that investors are no longer responding to a single macro theme, with markets instead swinging between shifting catalysts that have repeatedly changed where capital flows.

Warsh, Iran, and a Fed That Won’t Budge

According to BIT, traditional relationships between equities, gold, and BTC have broken down as investors continuously reprice assets around changing macro narratives.

Its report noted that the S&P 500 has climbed 9% year to date, while gold has fallen 6% and Bitcoin has dropped 31%. Rather than moving together, the three assets have responded differently as expectations around monetary policy, geopolitical events and AI have taken turns dominating investor attention.

BIT traced the first major shift to expectations surrounding Federal Reserve policy. After President Donald Trump proposed Kevin Warsh to lead the central bank, markets abandoned earlier expectations of three interest rate cuts this year and instead began pricing in a more hawkish policy path. The June Federal Open Market Committee meeting reinforced those expectations, keeping pressure on assets that typically benefit from easier liquidity, including Bitcoin and gold.

Then there was Iran, which closed off the Strait of Hormuz following strikes against it by the United States and Israel, sending oil prices jumping and equities falling. Gold also fell, since, according to BIT, markets expected central banks in the Middle East to redirect funds toward financing reconstruction of infrastructure affected by the conflict instead of buying more bullion.

With all that happening, BTC hit a downward patch of its own, dipping below the $60,000 level and breaking what the crypto firm described as its previous resilience during geopolitical crises.

You may also like:

Once the Iran arc cooled, attention then shifted almost entirely to artificial intelligence, with Nvidia’s reported $2 billion stake in Marvell Technology and Anthropic’s annual revenue beating the $30 billion mark, ahead of the $20 billion OpenAI had previously reported. That combination made the AI market’s dominant investment theme, lifting tech shares while drawing capital away from other assets.

Where BIT Thinks This Goes

However, the enthusiasm around AI started fading around June, with what BIT called the “tokenmaxxing” trade losing steam as companies began to notice the true cost of AI tokens, while cheaper open-source models out of China added more pressure.

The report also noted that spot Bitcoin ETFs became heavy sellers during that period, cutting holdings by about $9 billion while BTC itself went from about $82,000 to near $63,000.

Gold, in the firm’s view, is already technically oversold, and Bitcoin is closing in on a cycle bottom somewhere between $50,000 and $55,000. But it believes the current divergence will not last, especially if the September FOMC meeting brings a change in the Fed’s hawkish stance and AI spending demand picks back up while inflation cools. In that scenario, gold, BTC, and AI trades could all turn higher together.