📝 Hi, I'm 10. During the New Year, I had dinner with a friend who trades, and he complained that the market is too fragmented now. When Bitcoin falls, ARKK rises; when Bitcoin rises, ARKK is still rising. The previous feeling of sharing the same fate is completely gone.

I said you were quite perceptive to notice this point, and then showed him a perspective from Dovey Wan's recent interview: Bitcoin may never catch up with ARKK again.

👇👇👇

1. The once ironclad rule is quietly becoming ineffective.

In the past few years, we have gotten used to observing Bitcoin and ARKK together. From 2020 to 2021, the movements of the two assets were almost synchronous. Both rose against the backdrop of the Federal Reserve's easing; when the water came, they rose, and when the water stopped, they fell. The operation was simple and clear.

But after 2024, the script changes. ARKK starts to perform unusually strong, while Bitcoin appears somewhat lagging. This change is not just a simple matter of who is strong and who is weak; it reflects that capital is starting to pay more attention to financial reports.

Think about it, companies like Nvidia have solid performance, TSMC's production capacity is real, and OpenAI's API call volume can directly reflect market demand. These factors can help us clearly estimate the actual value of a company. In contrast, in the crypto market, aside from Bitcoin being regarded as the story of digital gold, most other projects remain at the conceptual stage.

Dovey mentioned that liquidity is undergoing a rotation. It's not that there's less money; it's that money is starting to flow towards those places that can clarify cash flow.

Two, The new liquidity black hole of AI

There's a metaphor that's quite vivid: money is like water in a bathtub, and financial assets are rubber ducks floating on it. To keep the duck afloat, either the water level must rise or the water must drain out more slowly.

In the past few years, capital expenditure in AI has been like pouring water into a bathtub. But now, every dollar invested in AI has to be drawn from somewhere else.

When money becomes tight, the market starts to eliminate competitors. Those highly speculative assets, which once rose sharply, are now also falling hard. Bitcoin, as a typical speculative asset, naturally becomes the first to be impacted.

And a greater trial is still on the way. In 2026, there may be a super liquidity bloodletting event, the IPO of SpaceX. It's said that the valuation may reach $15 trillion, with a financing scale potentially as high as $50 billion. This will be the largest IPO in human history.

Dovey says that early investors in SpaceX have been holding for so many years and should cash out now. At that time, those mutual funds and retirement funds may have to sell their holdings to free up money to invest in SpaceX.

Facing such a magnitude of bloodletting, the pressure on the crypto market is understandable.

Three, The wave of white-collar unemployment, another overlooked variable

There’s another change happening in less noticed areas. In the first half of 2025, New York City added only 1,000 new jobs. Dovey said it very directly: people in the financial industry are unemployed, and junior lawyers are also unemployed.

These people understand finance, know how to use leverage, and are familiar with various tools. Many people are now huddled in basements trading. It sounds like a joke, but it's actually a structural change that's happening.

The US stock market is slowly becoming more like the cryptocurrency market, dominated by retail investors, with high leverage and extreme volatility. The prices of silver and gold sometimes fluctuate just like cryptocurrencies.

But what truly tightened my heart was another metaphor from Dovey: We're not the female workers in a textile factory; we're the horses on a carriage. When the steam engine arrives, the driver can switch to driving a train, but what about the horse? The horse becomes truly useless.

When a cheaper option appears, money will naturally flow there. I ponder this statement repeatedly. In the next five years, personnel from the Big Four accounting firms, junior lawyers, and some engineers in Silicon Valley may really no longer be needed.

After Musk took over Twitter, there were massive layoffs, yet Twitter continues to operate. Google cut a third of its engineers, and the business is estimated to be unaffected.

For ordinary people, the survival issue in the next decade may be: how to avoid becoming that eliminated horse.

Four, How to endure in a bear market

1, The true bear market may not have arrived yet

Dovey has a saying that I particularly agree with: a true bear market should be quiet, even a bit silent. She feels that the real trough may still be ahead, especially with the SpaceX situation in 2026, which could result in a major bloodletting in the capital market.

2, The way of long-term investors: sensitivity, waiting for silence

Entities like Primitive Ventures that have long-term layouts live by eight words: maintain insensitivity, wait for silence.

Hold cash in hand; don't let daily fluctuations lead you astray. When the market truly quiets down, to the point of having no sound, that is when it's time to take action.

The bathtub water level in the market is slowly decreasing. The separation of Bitcoin and ARKK is not just a cyclical rotation; it's a shift in the logic of capital. AI has become the new black hole, white-collar unemployment is reshaping market structure, and geopolitical factors are redrawing the industry chain map.

This is not an ordinary bear market; it's a reset of pricing rules. The feeling of silence hasn't arrived yet. But for those who are prepared, this is precisely the time to wait quietly.