The trade duties imposed by US President Donald Trump on imports of goods from other countries triggered a global drop in stock market prices in early April.

This time, despite the extensive drop in the markets, bitcoin (BTC) quotes proved to be more stable than shares of many companies. According to experts, such dynamics can strengthen the positioning of the main cryptocurrency as a protective asset like gold.

"The most remarkable achievement of this week is that BTC did not collapse more. Bitcoin strengthened against stock indexes after the announcement of duties on April 2, which is a very unusual observation," Vetlе Lunde, head of research at K33, quotes Bloomberg.

The US authorities announced the introduction of duties ranging from 10 to 50% for more than 180 countries on the evening of April 2. Against this background, the main stock indexes tracking the prices of the largest American stocks, the S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100, showed double—digit declines.

From its peak on April 2 to April 9, the S&P 500 dropped by 12.5%, while the NASDAQ 100 fell by more than 13%, according to TradingView data. At the same time, the price of bitcoin dropped by almost 14%, to $77 thousand.

"Bitcoin performed well relative to the stock market partly due to the lower leverage in the bitcoin market on the day of the duties relative to other sales over the past month," said Ravi Doshi, head of FalconX brokerage, specializing in crypto assets.

Matt Hogan, Director of investments at Bitwise, a capital management company, was also impressed by the movement of quotations of the main cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin bulls should be inspired by the results. As soon as market volatility stabilizes, bitcoin will return to historical highs," the expert said.

Bitwise is one of the issuing companies that launched its own bitcoin spot ETF in January (ticker BITB on NASDAQ). The fund has $2.9 billion in assets under management. The firm is also known for creating the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund (BITW), a number of cryptocurrency-focused ETFs, and other investment products covering Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and NFT.

The drop in the price of bitcoin is no different from the decline in the capitalization of the crypto market as a whole, which turned out to be comparable to the main cryptocurrency — by about 13%, to $2.43 trillion.

According to Coinmarketcap, only about 30% of the list of the largest by capitalization collapsed more than bitcoin. The other 70% recorded a comparable drop or less.

One of the outsiders was the second largest cryptocurrency by capitalization, Ethereum (ETH), whose price decreased by 25% during the period under review.

Despite the optimism and the stability of bitcoin prices declared by many experts, analysts urge investors to be cautious amid the uncertainty surrounding the further development of the situation with duties.

"We have entered a new era of protectionism, and the worrying thing is that we still don't have an understanding of where it's all going to stop. All eyes are on how quickly the United States will be able to conclude new trade and non—trade deals," Pav Hundal, a leading market analyst at Swyftx, told Decrypt.

And even a slight price movement from current levels can trigger a wave of liquidations of trading positions in the futures market.

"We see long price clusters, where, according to our estimates, liquidations are triggered — at the levels of $73.8–74.4 thousand, $69.8–70 thousand, $66.1–67.7 thousand," Coindesk quotes Hyblock Capital analysts, who also identified a cluster of likely liquidations of positions at the levels of $80-81 thousand, $85.5 thousand.-86.7 thousand and $89.5–92.6 thousand.

Liquidations occur when the price moves against a trader's position with leverage and the exchange forcibly closes it at a loss due to a lack of collateral.

For example, if a trader opened a $1,000 long with 10x leverage, actually using $100 of his own funds, and borrowing the remaining $900 from the exchange, then a 10% drop in the bitcoin price would reduce the value of the position to $900.

The exchange automatically liquidates the transaction in order to return the borrowed funds, and the trader will lose all his capital if he did not have additional funds to maintain the position.

"Investors should be more careful in the short term due to the possibility of a further drop in the price of bitcoin to $ 70-75 thousand in the event of an escalation of trade tensions. However, this opens up an opportunity to buy in the long term," Ryan Lee, chief analyst at Bitget Research, told CoinDesk, noting the likelihood of a price recovery to $100,000 with macroeconomics stabilizing.