Fineqia's Matteo Greco on crypto market outlook – ICYMI

The key read-through is not “crypto weak, equities strong” so much as a regime split in liquidity appetite: passive flows are still propping up large-cap risk assets while speculative crypto remains hostage to marginal buyer absence. That usually persists until there is a catalyst that forces systematic re-risking in crypto — either a sharp easing impulse, a meaningful BTC trend break, or a vol compression event that pulls systematic allocators back in. Until then, the underperformance is self-reinforcing because fund flows, not fundamentals, dominate the tape.

For FNQQF, the main second-order effect is positioning optionality. If investor sentiment improves even modestly, a small-cap crypto-exposed name can outperform materially because these vehicles trade more like sentiment beta than operating businesses; the upside convexity is meaningful, but liquidity risk is equally real if crypto breadth deteriorates further. For NDAQ, the setup is subtler: strong equity indices support market-activity narratives, but crypto weakness can dampen enthusiasm for digital-asset adjacent product growth and listing/microstructure franchise expansion at the margin.

The contrarian point is that consensus may be overestimating how quickly crypto needs to “catch up” to equities. Divergence can persist for months when retail and levered capital are still repairing balance sheets, so chasing a mean-reversion trade too early risks paying theta for a thesis that only resolves after the next policy or volatility shock. The more interesting inflection is if equities remain elevated while crypto stays weak: that would likely trigger incremental media and institutional attention to crypto’s relative weakness, potentially creating a capitulation-style flush before a durable bottom.