BlackRock’s IBIT is not the only ETF drawing attention from bitcoin traders. A much smaller product from the gambling sector, the Roundhill Sports Betting & iGaming ETF (BETZ), has moved closely with BTC through several market cycles since 2020, and in a number of cases its major turning points appeared before bitcoin’s own reversals.
BETZ launched in June 2020 and has brought in only $98 million in net inflows. As of Tuesday, the fund had about $50 million in assets under management, a tiny figure next to the multibillion-dollar scale of IBIT. Even so, its price behavior has tracked bitcoin far more closely than its size might suggest.
Correlation readings remain elevated across both short and long windows
TradingView data cited in the report showed a 90-day correlation coefficient of 0.73 between BETZ and BTC. Over 365 days, the coefficient was 0.91. The article said this implies an R² of about 0.83, meaning more than 80% of the variation in the two assets’ movements is statistically linked. For a niche ETF tied to sports betting and iGaming, that is a striking relationship.
The more unusual point is not just correlation, but timing. When BETZ is plotted against bitcoin, the fund appears to reach major tops and bottoms a few weeks ahead of BTC in several different cycles. That pattern has repeated often enough to attract attention.
Several major tops and bottoms appeared first in BETZ
In one example from the report, BETZ peaked in September 2021, while bitcoin did not top until November 2021. By then, the ETF was already falling. On the downside, BETZ bottomed in September 2022, about three months before bitcoin reached its own low. A similar setup appeared last year: BETZ peaked in August, while BTC followed roughly two months later.
The article stopped short of treating that relationship as proof of causation. Correlation alone does not make BETZ a trigger for bitcoin price shifts. Still, the repeated lead-lag pattern across multiple cycles adds weight to the idea that bitcoin often trades more like a macro-sensitive risk asset than a classic safe-haven instrument, a view the piece linked to comments from observers including Ray Dalio.
Useful as a sentiment and liquidity proxy, not a standalone signal
For traders, the takeaway in the report was narrow and practical: BETZ may work better as a complementary sentiment and liquidity proxy than as a standalone predictor of BTC direction. The latest wrinkle is that BETZ has recently decoupled from rising bitcoin prices. Whether that gap becomes an early warning sign or fades as market noise remains unresolved in the source material.