Bitcoin: What is the Best Day of the Week to Buy?

Shifting Patterns

In the last issue of Seasonal Insights I have discussed Bitcoin’s seasonal pattern in the course of a year. In this issue I will show an analysis of the returns of bitcoin on individual days of the week.

It seems to me that Bitcoin is particularly interesting for this type of study: it exhibits spectacular price gains, it is a very new instrument and it is unregulated. Moreover, it trades around the clock, even on weekends.

Given this setup, I found myself wondering: do prices rise uniformly? And does their performance on weekends differ from that on workdays?

Bitcoin, daily

Bitcoin, daily – since bottoming in early December, BTC has advanced quite a bit. It remains an excellent trading sardine. [PT] - Click to enlarge

Bitcoin: The Action Mainly Takes Place at the Beginning of the Week

The first chart below shows the annualized performance of bitcoin since 2011 in black, as well as the cumulative annualized performance on individual days of the week in blue.

Note: due to the extent of the rally to date, the compounding effect is particularly strong; the average cumulative returns achieved on individual days of the week therefore don’t add up linearly to the total annualized return of bitcoin. In order to improve the clarity of the illustration, I have inserted a break in the black column and the scale of the y-axis.

As the chart shows, the beginning of the week is standing out noticeably: if one had invested exclusively on Mondays, an annual return of 27.53 percent would have been attained. The cumulative gain achieved on Tuesdays was even stronger at 39.88 percent!

By contrast, the average return of 7.71 percent achieved on Friday was  fairly small.

Moreover, Saturdays, and by the standards of bitcoin also Sundays and Wednesdays, were rather boring days as well.

Next we will take a look at the detailed evolution of these trends over time.

BTC average daily performance

Bitcoin, performance by individual days of the week, 2011 to 2019. In the long-term, the strongest gains were achieved at the beginning of the week - Click to enlarge

The Days of the Week under the Magnifying Glass

The next chart shows the performance of bitcoin since 2011 in black, as well as the cumulative return achieved on every individual day of the week in other colors – indexed to 100.

As the chart shows, Tuesday (yellow line) was well ahead of the pack from the very beginning.. However, if you look more closely, you can see that the pink line representing Friday is rising particularly strongly since 2016.  Along with the rising popularity of Bitcoin, the intraday pattern has changed.

In the rally in recent months the pink line representing Friday (which was recently hidden  behind the purple line) was able to keep pace. Thus it made more sense to buy on Friday morning rather than on Sunday morning during the recent upward move.

BTC days of the week cumulative, 2011-2019

Bitcoin, cumulative returns by day of the week, 2011 – 2019, indexed. Saturday is catching up - Click to enlarge