Grayscale's research head Zach Pandl found that removing bitcoin's 15 best trading days from the last three years turns a 225% gain into an 11% loss. The analysis argues that missing a handful of strong sessions can erase most of the return investors get from staying in the market.
Bitcoin's three-year return flips from a 225% gain to an 11% loss once its 15 best trading days are stripped out, according to an analysis Grayscale published on Oct. 5. Zach Pandl, the firm's head of research, built the comparison to show the opportunity cost of sitting out of the market while waiting for calmer conditions.
Just 15 Days Separate a Gain From a Loss
The math moves quickly once the top sessions come out. Excluding bitcoin's five best days cuts the three-year return to 95%, and removing the ten strongest sessions leaves a 27% cumulative gain. Taking out the top 15 flips the whole period into a loss.
For a hypothetical $10,000 investment, that difference is the gap between a $32,500 payout and an $8,900 one, before costs.
Pandl's note argues the strongest sessions cannot be reliably predicted, which is why investors waiting for volatility to subside may already have missed much of the repricing. That reasoning underpins Grayscale's preference for staying consistently exposed rather than trying to time rallies.
The Nasdaq-100's Swing Is Smaller
Grayscale ran the same test on the Nasdaq-100 for comparison. Without its 15 best trading days, the index's three-year return declined from 109% to 21%, a smaller swing than bitcoin's. The firm notes that fewer than 0.5% of days provided enough upside that excluding them more than halved bitcoin's cumulative gain, underlining how concentrated the asset's returns are.
Long-Term Holder Supply Tied to Volatility
A separate Glassnode analysis from Sept. 8 adds context on what drives that volatility. The firm identified long-term holder supply as the strongest explanatory variable for bitcoin's volatility among the factors it examined, pointing to coins held for at least 155 days. The measure explained nearly 19% of the variation after removing longer-term trends, though Glassnode stopped short of calling it causal.
Other recent forecasts sit alongside Pandl's backward-looking calculation rather than contradicting it. Cryptoquant CEO Ki Young Ju projected threefold to fivefold cycle returns alongside a milder downturn on Sept. 22, a forward-looking view distinct from Pandl's analysis of an observed period.
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