Bitcoin’s price is set to fall another 90% to $10,000 in 2026, warns Bloomberg Intelligence strategist Mike McGlone.
The reason? Mounting competition.
“Bitcoin was the first crypto in 2009,” McGlone wrote on LinkedIn. “But now [it] has millions of digital asset competitors.”
By contrast, gold has just three competitors — silver, platinum and palladium — McGlone said. The leading precious metal’s price will jump another 10% and trade at over $5,000 an ounce in 2026, he predicted.
McGlone’s extremely bearish call comes as Bitcoin heads into New Year’s Eve trading 30% below its $126,000 all-time high set in October.
Investors are dumping their Bitcoin holdings en masse. Bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded $1 billion in selloffs in December, adding to November’s $3.5 billion drawdown, DefiLlama data shows.
Meanwhile, other assets — including stocks and precious metals — set fresh records in December, propelled by strong macroeconomic tailwinds.
It is far from McGlone’s first bearish prediction. He made the $10,000 call earlier in December citing a new paradigm he describes as “post-inflation deflation,” a period when asset prices crash after an inflationary cycle.
McGlone warned that 2026 will be a bad year for all asset classes.
Surging gold prices relative to other assets “may be front-running a 2026 drawdown for US stocks, with headwinds for crude oil, copper, silver and all risk assets,” he said.
Not all doom
To be sure, not everyone is as pessimistic about the new year.
Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, said he expects economic productivity and market gains to skyrocket in 2026, driven by artificial intelligence and macro factors.
That means increased investor appetite for risky assets like Bitcoin.
“The bull market in stocks should broaden to the S&P 500’s Impressive-493, i.e., to the users of AI, rather than remaining concentrated among AI producers such as the S&P 500 Magnificent-7,” Yardeni said.
Yardeni also noted the heavy investment in US stocks by foreign investors, which hit a record $714 billion by October 2025 and could reach $1 trillion by the New Year.
“Historically, heavy foreign buying of US equities has been a bearish signal from a contrarian perspective,” he said.
“The signal certainly hasn’t worked recently.”
Offering a similarly bullish note, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes predicted earlier in December that Bitcoin will shoot to $200,000 by March. The US Federal Reserve will fuel that rally by adding some $40 billion of liquidity per month, Hayes argued.
Crypto market movers
Bitcoin is up 0.6% over the past 24 hours, trading at $88,275.
Ethereum is up 1.6% over the past 24 hours trading at $2,976.
