Ethereum Is Tanking and Wall Street’s Most Famous Bull Blames… Oil?!

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Ethereum (ETH, the leading altcoin that’s spent the last few weeks getting absolutely walloped on the crypto equivalent of a pub brawl) has finally had enough of people asking why it’s down, and Tom Lee-Wall Street’s very own permabull, the bloke who thinks a market dip is just a discount sale for people who aren’t cowards-claims he’s got the answer, and no, it’s not “crypto is a scam” for the 47th time this month.

Lee, who spends his days as the head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors (a job title that basically means he gets paid to say “it’ll be fine” no matter how bad things look), has pointed the finger squarely at the boring old commodities market, the lot of them, for ETH’s current “I’d rather stay in bed and eat pickled onions” mood.

The Fundstrat (or Fudstrat, if you’re feeling particularly uncharitable) big cheese hopped on X, that digital town square where everyone argues about crypto and whether cats are better than dogs, to drop his take: sky-high oil prices are the biggest, most annoying headwind currently trying to blow ETH off the road, like a gust of wind that only exists to mess up your umbrella on a sunny day.

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If you’ve been sat staring at your ETH portfolio wondering why it looks like someone spilled hot tea all over it:

– in my very expert opinion (I have a tie and everything), rising oil prices are the biggest pain in the arse headwind going
– the inverse correlation between ETH and oil is now higher than it’s ever been, which is saying something, because crypto correlations are normally about as reliable as a Discworld dwarf’s promise to only have one more drink

– Thomas (Tom) Lee (not the drummer from that band your mum likes, for the record) FundstratDirect.com (@fundstrat) May 18, 2026

An Unprecedented Inverse Correlation (Or Why Two Things That Shouldn’t Care About Each Other Are Acting Like A Bickering Married Couple)

Lee has pointed out that these two assets have been acting so weirdly correlated you’d think they were related, or at least went to the same pub on Fridays.

A chart pulled straight from a Bloomberg terminal (the sort of thing that costs more than most people’s cars, and is about as fun to look at as a tax return) that Lee shared tracks the daily rolling correlation between ETH and crude oil all the way back to 2018, back when people were still arguing about whether crypto was just a fad for people who wanted to buy drugs online.

Historically, the pair’s relationship has been about as stable as a Discworld troll who’s had one too many pints of lamp oil: it’s swung between positive correlation (as high as +0.40, which is about as strong a link as the one between a librarian and a quiet reading nook) and mild inverse correlation (the red dips on the chart, for anyone who hasn’t spent their life staring at financial graphs and questioning their life choices).

Right now, though? Their relationship is so weird it’d make even a witch’s familiar raise an eyebrow. It’s completely anomalous, the sort of thing that makes financial analysts mutter “that’s not how this is supposed to work” into their morning coffee like they’re discussing a poltergeist in the office printer.

The far right of the chart has a big, dramatic red cliff that looks like someone dropped a pint of red wine on it, and it shows the inverse correlation between ETH and oil has plummeted to roughly -0.40, the highest level of negative correlation ever recorded. For those of you who don’t speak finance, that means every time oil prices creep up, ETH gets sold off faster than a Discworld hot dog at a dwarf convention. It’s not complicated.

The two lines on the chart track each other with a precision so eerie you’d think they were choreographed by the Auditors of Reality. From mid-April through to now, every little spike in oil prices is matched instantly by a drop in ETH’s price, like oil is a grumpy older sibling who keeps tripping up ETH every time it tries to walk down the stairs. The plunge in the inverted oil line matches ETH’s recent sell-off so perfectly it’s almost spooky, like someone’s deliberately poking one to make the other fall over.

If oil prices ever decide to stop being so dramatic and reverse course, it’ll probably act as a very strong price catalyst for ETH, like giving a tired dwarf a double shot of scumble to get him moving again.

Tactical Noise (Or The Sort of Short-Term Wibble That Even the Gods of the Stock Market Ignore Most Days)

Lee, who also runs ETH treasury giant Bitmine (a job that basically means he’s responsible for a very large pile of digital money that people keep trying to steal), is still just as bullish on ETH long-term as he is about the idea that a dwarf will stop drinking after one pint, even with these temporary headwinds making life miserable.

The permabull (a title he earned by predicting the market would go up so many times even a stopped clock looks consistent by comparison) reckons the current price action is just short-term tactical noise, the sort of thing that’s about as important as a flea biting a griffin.

He’s stressed that the actual big-picture macroeconomic drivers for the leading altcoins are still firmly in place, even if the altcoin itself is currently acting like it’s had a bad turnip and doesn’t want to come out to play.

Fundstrat’s overall take is that ETH prices will rally eventually, once the energy markets stop having a hissy fit and calm down a bit, probably around the same time the Discworld elephant decides to stop sitting on the market’s chest.

In the meantime, the ETH/BTC pair recently plunged to 0.027, the lowest it’s been since mid-July, which is roughly the last time a group of wizards accidentally turned the entire crypto market into a flock of very confused chickens for three days.

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2026-05-18 10:57