Bitcoin Price Stats from 2011–2018 — Data Analysis
With Bitcoin price data available since 2010 from Bitcoin Visuals*, I thought it would be fun to analyze and reveal any interesting bits from the 3090 price points spanning July 17th, 2010 thru December 31st, 2018.
Highlights
- Bitcoin has gained in value every April 2nd with an average return of 2.33%. 👍
- In 2013, Bitcoin jumped a whopping 54x times! 🚀
- Bitcoin has only had two yearly losses. -58% in 2014 and -74% in 2018. It has never lost value in back to back years. 🤞
- The longest Bitcoin winning streak is 17 days for a total gain of 211%. Its worst losing streak is 8 days with a -24% loss. ⚾
- Historically, November is the best performing month and September is the worst performing for Bitcoin. 🧐
- On average, Tuesdays and Wednesday are generally better performing than Sunday. 🗓️
- BTC has gained 45% in one day and lost -36% in another. 🎢
- Bitcoin price data is bullish biased. 1627 Up days vs 1463 Down days. 💪
Yearly Performance
2013 was by far the best year for Bitcoin with a 5474% gain.
2018 was the worst year for Bitcoin with a -74% loss.
What’s interesting to see is if 2019 will be a positive year for Bitcoin since there hasn’t been back to back losing years yet.
Monthly Performance
November 2013 with a 475% gain was Bitcoin’s best performing month.
September 2011 with a -40% loss was Bitcoin’s worst performing month.
On average, November was the best performing month with an average gain of 60.41% and September was the worst with an average loss of -5.48%.
Daily Performance
February 1st, 2011 with a 45% gain was the best performing day.
April 12th, 2013 with a 36% drop was the worst performing day.
In general, Sunday was the weakest performing day. Tuesday and Wednesday were better performing days.
Out of the 3090 total days, 1627 were positive days and 1463 were negative days.
On an average % change basis, Wednesday was the best performing and Friday was the worst with Sunday only a hair away. However, just looking at Positive vs. Negative days, Tuesday was positive 56% of the time while Sunday was only gaining 47% of the time, so only slightly better than a coin-toss in either direction.
Performance Across Days and Months
The heatmap below shows the average price changes for days of the week across the respective months. For example in November, Wednesdays (green box) performed better than Tuesdays (red box). It can also been seen for instance that September (all shades fo red) is worse performing than say November or April (more green boxes). This matches up with our Monthly Performance above to some extent but also breaks down the Day of the Week performance for each month.
Month-Day Performance
Every April 2nd has been positive with an average gain of 2.33%.
On the flip side, September 21sts have only been in the green 1 out of 9 times with an average loss of -1.67%.
A chart of the dates (Month-Day) and positive days ratio. 04–02 had a positive ratio of 1 (100% positive days) and 09–21 had a positive ratio of .11 (11% positive days). They are noted in the chart below as reference.
Longest Streak
The longest winning streak is 17 days from March 24th, 2013 at $68.62 to April 9th at $213.72 for a total gain of 211%.
The longest losing streak is 8 days from June 28th, 2011 at $16.93 to July 5th, 2011 at $12.80 for a total loss of 24%.
Conclusion
While there are some interesting points from this analysis, it’s hard to put any into real practice. Bitcoin price data is bullish biased in general. It’s also no stranger to violent volatility. It might be interesting to follow up after another 10 years of data points to see if anything has changed. For now while there are some interesting tidbits, it’s all open to interpretation. Special thanks to Bitcoin Visuals and all the great tools available — Pandas, MongoDB and Airtable — which made this possible!
If there’s anything I should dig into further, missed or needs further clarification, feel free to leave a comment.
Btw, Happy Birthday to Bitcoin which turned 10 on January 3rd, 2019!
*Bitcoin Visuals sources the median price data from BitcoinAverage.com / CoinMarketCap.com so the dates and prices may vary from those listed on exchanges and other indices.
Disclaimer: Information provided for educational purposes only.
