In my October 28th post “Almonds and Bitcoin: Way Too Soon to Declare Victory for Crypto Donors”, I argued it was way premature for Scott Alexander to proclaim crypto donors had gotten their ‘money’s worth’ backing Trump. With today’s Bitcoin crash, closing below $100k, it’s clear: I was right (at least so far).
MicroStrategy (purple-MSTR), Tesla (black-TSLA), Bitcoin (blue-IBIT), and Coinbase (gold-COIN)–widely assumed to be the biggest beneficiaries of a Trump win–have given up most or all of their post-election gains, and are lagging the Nasdaq100 (green-QQQ) over the past year from November 13, 2024 to November 13, 2025:
If you include the 7 days after the election, from the 6th to the 13th of November 2024, all except MSTR are outperforming the QQQ, although this outperformance is rapidly shrinking:
So your window to buy was extremely narrow–before the election. Odds are, the vast majority of people bought after those 7 days and have lagged a simple diversified tech index, that being QQQ. TSLA has done the best, which I own and have long recommended on the blog. This goes to show my prowess in terms of stock picking and forecasting, because I avoided all the crypto and honed in on the best one.
Making matters worse, this is against a huge rally for QQQ post-election, up 25%. So adjusting for the market’s strong performance, the underperformance of COIN, MSTR, TSLA, and IBIT are even more pronounced. Tech stocks, despite their CEOs donating nothing and being ambivalent or even hostile to Trump, have done the best since Trump’s reelection, excluding the first 7 days.
So why has crypto done so poorly? Why was I right? On October 4th, I gave three reasons. I was way ahead of the curve, as far back as late 2024 and January 2025 in predicting Trump would be unable or unwilling to establish a Bitcoin reserve, profiting from Polymarket on this, and then applying it to the hedging method as well. In August, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dropped the worst news possible, ruling out Bitcoin purchases to fund the reserve, dashing those hopes. This agreed with my predictions. I was already way ahead, knowing this would happen.
Of course, there is a non-zero probability that the aforementioned investments could surge for remaining three years of Trump’s second term and outperform QQQ, but so far it’s not looking promising. Trump would have to throw his weight behind crypto and get lawmakers on board, but that is asking too much. Or there would have to be another crypto surge, like from 2020-2021 during Covid, but that too seems improbable when the spotlight continues to be on AI.