Amidst a global market selloff in which bitcoin dipped below $50,000, trading volume for spot BTC ETFs saw elevated levels of trading volume in the first several hours on Monday.
According to data tracked by Coinglass, spot BTC ETFs have already garnered a trading volume of roughly $4.7 billion on Monday, with the majority of the activity coming from BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) which is responsible for about 52% of the total.
The $4.7 billion figure representing the collective trading volume for spot BTC ETFs so far on Monday is the highest single-day count since March 25, 2024 when the daily volume stood at $6.1 billion, per The Block and Yahoo Finance.
The elevated trading volume levels for spot BTC ETFs come as the equities market sold off, led by Japan’s Nikkei 225, which plunged 12%. Not only has BTC dropped 19% in the past seven days to trade at $54,931 currently, after slumping as low as $49,221 Monday morning, but the S&P 500 has fallen considerably, decreasing almost 5% in the past seven days.
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“If you [are a] bitcoin bull, you actually don’t want to see crazy volume today as ETF volume on bad days is a pretty reliable measure of fear,” wrote Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas on X. “On flip, deep liquidity on bad days is part of what traders and institutions love about ETFs, so you also want to see volume too, good for the long term.”
Some speculate that the trading volume of spot BTC ETFs stems from investors acquiring more BTC in light of the overall downturn. Head of research at Galaxy, Alex Thorn, said, “My guess [for the increase in trading volume] is we see dip-buying inflows.”
According to Galaxy Research, Bitcoin has the eighth-highest Sharpe ratio year-to-date, following the S&P 500, Netflix, JPMorgan, Meta, Goldman Sachs, gold, and NVIDIA. In finance, the Sharpe ratio measures an investment’s returns in relation to the amount of risk incurred. A lower Sharpe ratio typically means an investment doesn’t justify the risk taken, while a higher ratio denotes a better return for risk incurred.
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The total market cap of spot BTC ETFs is $51.9 billion at the time of writing, an almost 19% decrease from $63.9 billion one week ago, per Coinglass.
On the other hand, Coinglass shows that the trading volume for spot ether ETFs on Monday reached nearly $614.7 million in trading volume, led by Grayscale’s ETHE. Per The Block and Yahoo Finance, Monday is the sixth-highest day by volume, trailing the first five days of the ETH ETFs’ debut in July.
