Mike McGlone, senior commodities strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, raises red flags about a metric that rarely gets as much attention as the dollar price but often tells a bigger story: how much gold one Bitcoin can actually buy.
In his latest notes and charts, McGlone said the balance of risk is ugly, noting that as of Dec. 22, the cross between Bitcoin and gold was close to 20x. Essentially, he is saying that it is more likely that Bitcoin’s value will fall 10 times its current value in 2026 than it is that it will rise 30 times its current value.
If that happens, Bitcoin’s purchasing power relative to gold will be cut in half, although the USD chart may not look as dramatic.
McGlone essentially says that the Bitcoin-to-gold ratio is acting as an early warning chart. This ratio tends to come under pressure when recession risk increases, and there’s a reason why this ratio now appears next to the S&P 500 and market volatility. The key takeaway from this frame is that stock prices, volatility, and the Bitcoin-gold cross are still moving together more than people appreciate, with a correlation around 0.5376, meaning it’s still a “risk-on, risk-off” package.
Bitcoin will be worth $50,000 in 2026
Ultimately, McGlone zooms out to a 2026 outlook for “where the lows will be,” with core CPI easing toward 1%, oil near $40, gasoline around $2, and Bitcoin around $50,000.
He doesn’t insist on a date or exact target, but says that if U.S. stocks drop about 10% and continue to decline without heading back “north,” those are the kind of cycle-level prices that often appear when the market eventually resets.
