When Silicon Valley Bank failed in March 2023, the reasonable expectation was that a financial panic would drag every risk asset down together. Bitcoin did the opposite: it fell to $19,522 early in this window, then rallied to close near $24,683, a gain of about twenty-one percent, as buyers treated the banking system's stress as an argument for holding an asset outside it.
The window is hard because the correct trade required abandoning a correlation that had held for over a year. Selling the crisis was the obvious move and it was wrong; the market had changed which story it was pricing, and it did so within hours.
Same engine, same hidden right-hand side — a different day's problem.