The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin Bull Market Is HAPPENING NOW | Anthony Pompliano

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Bitcoin is in a bull market right now. Anthony Pompliano breaks down the data — from institutional moves like Morgan Stanley's record ETF launch to Bitcoin's track record across 7 financial crises — and makes the case for why the next all-time high is closer than most people think.====================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.====================0:00 - Intro0:41 - Bitcoin's performance during 7 consecutive financial crises since 20202:13 - Morgan Stanley's record-breaking bitcoin ETF launch3:05 - Charles Schwab turns on direct bitcoin trading3:41 - Strategy's $2B Bitcoin purchase & institutional demand signals4:45 - Bitwise report: under 1% chance of loss holding Bitcoin 3+ years6:11 - The "333" stock market signal & what it predicts for the next 12 months8:05 - Tom Lee: why the next 18–24 months could be the best of our lifetime10:21 - Buying at all-time highs & consumer sentiment vs. asset prices12:45 - The White House, midterm elections & impact on bitcoin14:19 - Final outlook & who will win

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Now, Bitcoin's got to draw down from its all-time high in order to be prepared to slingshot back to new all-time highs. We're down about 40% from $126,000. But you can look to see that Bitcoin bottomed around $60,000. We're up about 25% from that cycle low. On top of that, Bitcoin is up just under 20% since the Iran war started. Now, the reason why that movement off the bottom is so important is because it happened pretty quickly and it happened fairly violently. But the more important part is that now Bitcoin has stood the test of time. It has done one thing that institutional capital needed it to do. Bitcoin has been the best performing asset during seven consecutive financial crises since 2020. Let me explain. If we look at this chart here from

OnRamp, it shows that Bitcoin continues to outperform the S&P and gold. And if it's outperforming the S&P and gold, then it's definitely outperforming dollars and treasuries during these financial crises. Now, it doesn't matter whether we're talking about a global pandemic, foreign countries invading their neighbors, domestic policy decisions like tariffs, or a national banking crisis. 60 days after the event, Bitcoin is the best performing asset, regardless of what you're looking at. The reason why that's important is because Bitcoin has become the king of safe haven assets. Institutions know that Bitcoin's volatile. They know that they can go and drive asymmetric returns if they buy it and hold it for long enough. But they never understood what

was Bitcoin going to do during market drawdowns? What was it going to do during the tough times? Could they take their institutional capital, put it into Bitcoin and make sure that Bitcoin performed? But the track record is clear now. Seven times since 2020, every single financial crisis that's occurred, Bitcoin has been the winner. It's better than holding stocks. It's better than holding gold. It's better than holding dollars or treasuries. Where else are you going to go. Bitcoin has now gotten onto Wall Street. It's gotten into these people's portfolio. And it's an idea whose time has come and they will not be able to get their minds out of it. Now, it's not just me saying this, though. Let's go look at what's actually happening in the market. Morgan Stanley,

one of the oldest investment banks on Wall Street, recently launched a Bitcoin ETF. Many people would say they're late to the game. They haven't actually launched this thing, even though BlackRock, Fidelity and many others are already in the market. But Morgan Stanley reported over 100 million of inflows in the first week. And it's the single best ETF launch they've had in the history of the firm. Over a century worth of work, this was the best one. If you don't think that that's going to get the attention of people, if you don't think that there's executives at Morgan Stanley right now saying that Bitcoin thing, we may have a business there. How do we go and do more things with Bitcoin or crypto? How do we go find more clients, more assets and get

more revenue from that sector? Of course, that is going to be the talk internally. And of course, people are going to start asking themselves, how do we get more client capital into Bitcoin so we can grow our business? On top of that, you can go and see Charles Schwab doing almost the exact same thing. They're not going to launch an ETF, but Charles Schwab is saying they now are going to offer direct trading for their users in the Charles Schwab platform. Charles Schwab has been around since the time of JP Morgan, not the bank, but the actual person. Charles Schwab is supposed to be the big institutional brokerage firm. But now they realize that Robinhood is kicking their but it's growing two times faster than Charles Schwab is going.

And a big reason for that is crypto. And so Charles Schwab saying that they now are going to turn on Bitcoin trading inside of their platform, that's a really big deal. And I think it's something you can't ignore. And then, of course, we can go to the actual institutional product, STRC or Stretch. It comes from strategies to preferred equity offering. We have seen multiple days of over a billion dollars of trading volume in that.

We've seen inflows that are record high. Just this week, Michael Saylor announced that they bought $2 billion worth of Bitcoin. These are massive numbers, and it shows that there is high demand for digital credit on Wall Street. So whether it is looking at Morgan Stanley, whether it's looking at something like Charles Schwab, or you're looking at strategy stretch product, it is very obvious that Bitcoin is now an acceptable asset to these large pools of capital. And if Bitcoin is an acceptable asset, that means that you're going to see less drawdowns during the volatile moments, and you're going to continue to see the outperformance during the good times.

And that's exactly what we have seen over the last couple of weeks. Bitcoin is delivering on its promise. Bitcoin is supposed to be a chaos hedge. It's supposed to provide some certainty in a world of uncertainty. And that's what Bitcoin has been doing. The 60-day return around these financial crises is a stat that you cannot look away from. You cannot ignore it. And on top of that, Bitwise, the crypto asset manager, just came out with a brand new report

that I think is something every single person is going to pay attention to. Bitwise's report shows what is the probability of loss across certain time holding periods. And what it shows is that if you hold Bitcoin for at least three years, the probability of losing money on that investment is under 1%. Less than 1% probability of losing money on Bitcoin if you hold for at least three years. Do you think a lot of institutions who have a very long duration to their capital aren't interested in all of a sudden going and holding Bitcoin for at least three years? Of course. What is the probability of loss of holding any other asset? Bitcoin is very unique. It is not only being able to weather these drawdowns and these uncertainties around

geopolitics or other issues, but on top of that is providing the asymmetric return. And that ultimately is going to be very attractive to people. Now, Bitcoin doesn't just operate in a vacuum anymore. It used to operate outside the system completely. And what was going on with interest rates or geopolitics or anything else had no impact on Bitcoin. That is no longer Bitcoin's reality. Now Bitcoin operates in the global macro environment and the Iran war when everything else was selling off, Bitcoin held steady and actually increased in price. But we have to look to the stock market to understand some of Bitcoin's future as well. Bitcoin is much more sensitive to global liquidity or what happens with interest rates than the stocks are. But the

stock market right now is showing numerous signs that we should expect a generational bull run in public equities. First, we can look at what I call the 3-3-3. What is that? The stock market has gone up 3% or more for three straight weeks. Now, why is that important? That's happened three times in the last 76 years. All three times, the stock market went up over 30% over the next 12 months. The average return was 33%. So 3% or more per week for three weeks straight happened three times over 76 years, and the average return was 33%. 3-3, 3-3, 3-3. And that tells us that right now, because we just had over 3% for three weeks straight, likely to have a big bull market. Today's episode is brought to you by ArchPublic. I absolutely love these guys. ArchPublic is an

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Your crypto, your exchange, your profits. Archpublic. Go to archpublic.com and tell them I sent you. But again, you don't have to listen to me. Tom Lee, who's a Wall Street analyst, very well known for many of his bullish calls over the years. He believes the next 18 to 24 months is going to be some of the best stock market performance in our lifetime. Not in a year, not in five years, not in 10 years. He says in our lifetime.

Take a listen to what Tom had to say here. One thing that we should that we were at Fundstrat were emphasizing is that inflation adjusted. Even gasoline prices here aren't nearly the burden they were five years ago, 10 years ago, even at the 08 peak. And the war is stimulating the economy. And we can see that in the earnings estimates and the ISM and even the jobs report. So I think the state of the consumer is one thing versus maybe how they might hear in a radio commercial or the surveys. But I do think the consumer is in better shape. So I think the retail investor will end up chasing this stock rally.

And you think as they do, that will power it higher? Yes, but for the right fundamental reasons, because earnings estimates are higher. The U.S.'s relative position has really been strengthened by what's been exposed by supply change through this war. And I think as the world investor looks for growth and they worry about growth in general, they're going to buy the U.S. stock market, which is a growth index. We're going to talk in just a moment about international and whether you should, not that you have to choose.

You can do both. But if you had to pick U.S. versus international, is it U.S.? I'd still be overweighting U.S. because I think if you think about where innovation comes from, whether it's in tech, health care or financial services or fintech, that's really U.S. companies. And I think there was an argument the U.S. PE should de-rate. But but the war has exposed that the U.S. multiple should be going up. Really? So that could be accounting. We could get both earnings and multiple expansion this year. Yes, I think once we're through, you know, this is still going to be a very tricky year because we have a new Fed chair coming in.

The market's going to test that Fed chair. But once we get through that subsequent turbulence, we are probably entering, you know, an 18 to 20 months, 24 month period. That might be the one of the best we've ever seen in our life. Now, the reason why it's so interesting to hear Tom say this is because I also agree with him that the stock market is likely to go much higher over the next 18 to 24 months. But the stock market's already at an all time high price. and we know that buying the stock market at an all-time high

is better than buying any other day. If you buy at all-time high levels, usually the performance over the next six months and 12 months is better than if you buy on any other given day in the stock market. So you're buying momentum, you're buying strength and strength begets more strength. Returns beget more returns. People chase the rallies as Tom was talking about

and I think that's exactly what we're going to see happen here. But the other thing that's important to pay attention to is that the stock market is hitting all-time highs at the exact same time that consumer sentiment is hitting all-time lows. Now, I've got plenty of critiques of the consumer sentiment survey. I actually think it's pretty inaccurate,

but let's take it at face value and say that actually people are really upset that consumer sentiment is in the toilet. Well, that's where something like Bitcoin becomes really important. It's because Bitcoin is hope to a lot of people. They don't know anything about real estate. They don't know how to select individual stocks.

They simply use Bitcoin as a savings tool. They say, I'm going to go to work, I'm going to work hard, I'm going to make money, I'm going to spend less than I make every single month in terms of my daily expenses, and I'm going to take whatever's left over, I'm going to save it in Bitcoin. The sound money principles of Bitcoin are going to provide me benefit. And if Bitcoin is going to be tied closely to the stock market in terms of the sensitivity to global liquidity, then that means stocks are going up and Bitcoin's going up. And so you have this double whammy, is that the stock market performance at all time highs

is very attractive and consumer sentiment is so low that it's going to push people towards Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an apex predator of financial markets. And I think it's going to continue to do incredibly well. Don't listen to the haters and critics. They don't know what they're talking about. They continue to just spit nonsense all over the internet because they hate Bitcoin. They don't like it. They don't understand it. They can't believe that something that was built that violates all of their academic worldview could actually be successful. Bitcoin's a trillion and a half dollar asset.

It literally was started by an anonymous person on the internet. It had no institutional support. It had no venture capital. It had no sort of structure. Didn't have an executive team, a marketing budget or any sort of business plan. But Bitcoin succeeded

because it was the best solution in the market. That type of meritocracy is exactly why Bitcoin is strong. it is resilient and it will continue to win. But now when you take Bitcoin, you combine it with the global macro environment, you combine it with the stock market signals that are showing us that likely asset prices are going to do very well over the next 12 months. And it begs the question, what could derail the situation? In my opinion, the White House is actually one of the biggest inputs, whether the stock market and Bitcoin are going to be successful or not. Let me explain why. We know that the stock market was rocking.

We know that the economy was rocking. And then all of a sudden we went and we bombed Iran. Now, the president was recently on CNBC and he talked about the fact that he knew by doing that, that it was likely that oil and gas prices were going to spike. He knew that the stock market was going to get a little shaky there, but he did it anyways. So that tells me that he believes that we're going to be right back

to all-time highs that we're already seeing in stocks. And that he believes that oil and gas prices are going to come down. Now, you may disagree. You may not think that that's actually going to happen, but that's what he believes. And during that interview on CNBC, he talked about having stocks at all-time highs and having oil only trading at $90, that's much better than a lot of people were predicting. They were predicting $150 a barrel. So only at $90 has actually been somewhat of a win.

But I don't think that's good enough for the American people. The American people, they want affordability to improve. They want gas at the pump to come down, and they want to see all of their assets continue to increase in price. And so ultimately, what we are going to watch is a president who now is headed into a midterm election. And if you don't think that he is going to do whatever he possibly can to juice the stock market, juice asset prices, and get affordability down at the same time, I don't know what to

tell you. But what I believe is going to happen here is that we are going to see an absolute eruption in GDP. We are going to continue to see the AI boom continue to accelerate. and we are going to see the debasement of the US dollar, which is going to all feed into asset prices continue to go higher. I think Bitcoin is going to be a major winner

over the next 12 months. And I think that the White House is going to be a big part of it. So ultimately, when you take the sum of all of these different data points, you know that Bitcoin has had strength off of the bottom of its straw down. You know that Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab,

Strategy, and many other large players are pouring capital into the Bitcoin market. You know that the stock market is shooting a ton of signals that suggest it's going to have a very strong next 12 months. You have some of the most famous analysts on Wall Street saying that a generational bull market is upon us. And you also know that the White House is sympathetic to Bitcoin and crypto. And you know that they're paying attention to the economy and to the stock market because

of the midterm elections. Everything is positioned for Bitcoin to go higher over the next 12 months. Could it go down? Sure. but also the sky could turn red and unicorns could jump out of the sky as well. I ultimately believe that Bitcoin bull market has already begun.

How high can it go? I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball. That's for you at home to decide. Do I think that Bitcoin's going to a million bucks in the next 12 months? Probably not. But I think that Bitcoin's going higher.

And I think there's a lot of people who are going to get caught offsides because they've been begging for an 85% drawdown. But Bitcoin's volatility has dampened. It's why Bitcoin didn't skyrocket to 500K in the bull market. It's also probably why it's not going to drop to $30,000 in the bear market either. So ultimately, who's going to win in this environment? It's Bitcoin holders who can hold for at least three years or longer and who understand what

they own. They realize that they have a digital, decentralized, neutral, non-sovereign asset. That asset has a finite supply. And ultimately, we are going to see dollars debased and we're going to see demand for Bitcoin increase. And that means that the dollars that you need to buy one Bitcoin is only going to increase. And the Bitcoin holders, the ones who can stomach all the volatility, the ones that can tune out all the noise, they're going to be the big winners.

And hopefully that'll be you.