Gold is an ancient non-yielding metal. The Nasdaq is a concentration of technology companies with distant future earnings. Bitcoin is a digital asset with a fixed issuance schedule. They have almost nothing in common — and they frequently move together for weeks at a time. The reason is a single shared input.
For the Nasdaq this is explicit. A company expected to earn most of its profits a decade from now is valued by discounting those profits back to today. A higher discount rate shrinks that present value sharply — far more sharply than for a company earning steadily right now. This is why growth-heavy indices are more rate-sensitive than value-heavy ones.
For gold the same force arrives as the real yield: the discount rate is the opportunity cost of holding something that pays nothing. For Bitcoin it arrives as liquidity and risk appetite, both of which tighten when real rates rise. Three different mechanisms, one underlying variable.
Through 2022, real yields rose substantially as central banks tightened. Gold fell, the Nasdaq fell, and Bitcoin fell much further. Commentary at the time frequently described this as "correlation breaking down" because assets supposedly serving different purposes fell together. The more accurate reading is that a single dominant driver overwhelmed the differences between them.
Common belief
"Gold and Bitcoin are both inflation hedges, so they move together for that reason."
What is actually true
They often move together, but the shared cause is rate and liquidity sensitivity, not a shared inflation-hedging property. The distinction matters: when real yields fall during a deflationary scare, both can rise while inflation expectations are falling — which the inflation-hedge story cannot explain.
The practical consequence is a diversification warning. Holding gold, technology shares and Bitcoin looks like three different bets and is substantially one bet on the direction of real rates. That is a legitimate position to hold, but it should be held knowingly.