What’s next as hot money cycle has gone from crypto to gold to AI to memory

The crypto sector remains deeply out of favor, not only from a price perspective, but also in terms of investor sentiment.

Capital flows and market attention have increasingly shifted toward other high-growth sectors, lately semiconductors and memory-related equities, which have effectively replaced crypto as the market’s dominant momentum trade.

This analysis compares the performance cycles of bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market cap; gold, the largest precious metal; NVIDIA (NVDA), the leading AI-driven equity; and memory and semiconductor names, including SanDisk (SNDK) and Micron Technology (MU).

Bitcoin experienced a huge rally from its November 2022 low through its October 2025 peak, surging more than 650% from roughly $15,000 to nearly $125,000. A significant portion of that move occurred between September 2024 and January 2025, when the price doubled from approximately $55,000 to $110,000 alongside Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory. The price ultimately topped around $126,000 last October.

Gold followed a delayed but similar trajectory, driven largely by the growing “debasement trade” narrative surrounding fiscal deficits and monetary expansion. The metal began its breakout in early 2024 near $2,000 per ounce and eventually climbed above $5,200 per ounce in February 2026, roughly four months after bitcoin peaked. Since then, gold has corrected nearly 20% and now trades below $4,400 per ounce.

NVIDIA followed a similar pattern, reaching a peak near $225 per share in May before easing back to $212, and it is now only slightly higher over the past six months.

Hot money trading has now shifted decisively toward memory and semiconductor companies such as Sandisk and Micron Technology, with Micron recently entering the $1 trillion market capitalization club after having a valuation of just $70 billion only one year ago.

With SpaceX potentially approaching the largest IPO in history, and OpenAI and Anthropic possibly soon to follow, investor attention could shift once again. Much like crypto, gold and AI infrastructure before them, these companies could become the next major destination for speculative and momentum-driven capital, potentially defining the next phase of the market cycle.

With investors about to get a new shiny object on which to shower attention and money, bitcoin and crypto could be sidelined from bull runs for far longer than expected.