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Tools · Seasonality

Monthly Returns

Every calendar month since Bitcoin started trading, colored green for gains and red for losses. Popular seasonality claims — "September is weak," "Q4 is strong" — are easy to check for yourself against the full grid below.

Data: PriceUSD · Coin Metrics community API · computed live in your browser, nothing uploaded

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What this chart shows

Each cell is the percentage change from the first recorded price of that calendar month to the last. The current month is necessarily incomplete — it shows the return so far, not a finished month — and the earliest month (July 2010) is partial for the same reason.

Month Return % = (Last Price in Month / First Price in Month − 1) × 100

The stat cards above summarize the full grid: how often a month closes positive, the average monthly return, and the best and worst single months on record.

How to read it

Scan a column (say, every September, or every December) to eyeball whether a specific month has historically leaned one way. With roughly a dozen-plus observations per calendar month, this is thin evidence by any statistical standard — but it's the same evidence people are citing when they make seasonality claims, laid out so you can check the claim yourself rather than take it on faith.

Limitations — why this isn't a seasonality trading signal

Bitcoin has traded for around 15 calendar years. That means any single month (say, every October) has at most 15 observations — nowhere near enough to establish a statistically reliable seasonal pattern, no matter how consistent it might look in this table.

Each of those observations came from a different market structure and macro backdrop (pre-exchange era, ICO boom, COVID liquidity, ETF era). Treating them as repeated trials of the same experiment, which any seasonality claim implicitly does, is a stretch.

This page reports what happened, not why. A run of strong Novembers could reflect genuine seasonality, pure coincidence, or a few outsized events landing in the same month by chance — the grid alone can't tell those apart.

Further reading

Bitcoin Seasonality: Is There Really a 'Best Month' to Buy?

FAQ

Is Bitcoin seasonality real?
Nobody can say with confidence either way from price history alone. Some months do show a lopsided record in this table, but with roughly 15 years of data, that record could easily be coincidence rather than a repeatable pattern — the sample is simply too small to distinguish the two.
Which month has historically been Bitcoin's best?
Check the stat card above — it's computed live from the full dataset rather than quoted from a specific past article, so it stays current as new months are added.
Why is the most recent month's return sometimes small even mid-rally?
Because the current month is partial by definition — it only reflects days elapsed so far, not a completed month. Compare it to other months' full totals with that in mind.