Drawdown from All-Time High

The Drawdown from All-Time High plots, for every Bitcoin daily close since 18 July 2010, the percent gap between that day's close and the highest close the network had ever recorded up to that point. The series is non-positive by construction. It sits at zero on every day a new all-time high prints, and it grows more negative the further price retreats from the running maximum.

Today's reading places Bitcoin at −37.3% from the running all-time high of $124,773.51, set on 07 Oct 2025. That puts the network in the Bear territory regime. The fill spans the gap from the zero baseline down to the curve, so historical bear phases read visually as deep basins below the top edge — every cycle trough on record is one of those basins.

The inputs are a single series: every Bitcoin daily close in USD (provenance documented on the data sources page). For every day t we compute the running maximum and the distance to it:

ath_t = max(price_0, price_1, …, price_t)
dd_t = price_t / ath_t − 1

Both quantities expand monotonically: ath can only go up, dd only ever crosses back to zero by setting a new ath. The series carries one extra column — days_since_ath — which counts calendar days since the running maximum was last set; that is the number that runs into the hundreds during deep bear phases and resets to zero on every fresh peak.

The chart uses the merged daily-close history (Mt. Gox-era 2010–2013 from the one-time CSV, post-2013 from the live daily feed). There is no smoothing and no model fit — drawdown is a pure pass over the daily-close series, documented in full on the methodology page.

Locate today's mark on the right edge and trace the basin to the left: how far below the top edge it sits is the current drawdown; how far back it stretches before crossing the zero line is the time since the last all-time high. The five regime bands below carry the historical context for each depth band. Thresholds are conventional and community-set, not original to this site.

Walking the daily series and emitting one row for every multi-month underwater stretch that hit at least a 20% drawdown surfaces the cycle anatomy directly. Every cycle's deep drawdown is here, plus the 2021 mid-cycle correction (the one that briefly took spot from the April $64,863 high to roughly $30k that summer) and any post-2024 dips. Prices are our own daily closes; no value is hard-coded.

By cycle: 2013–2015 bottomed at roughly −86% on close (some intraday prints went deeper, briefly); 2017–2018 at −84%; 2021–2022 at −77%. Each step is a narrower basin than the one before it.

The same pattern appears in time-underwater, slightly less cleanly. Bitcoin spent roughly 1,180 days underwater after the November 2013 peak, 1,060 days after the December 2017 peak, and 850 days after the November 2021 peak before a fresh ATH was set. Cycle drawdowns are still long — measured in years, not months — but each cycle's bear has been shorter and shallower than the last, which is what a maturing asset class is supposed to look like.

The honest qualifier: four full cycles is not a sample size to extrapolate from. The pattern is suggestive. Whether the next bear bottoms at −65% or −80% is the kind of question this chart cannot answer.

Drawdown depth is one half of the cost; the other half is duration. A −77% drawdown that recovers in eighteen months is a different experience from a −77% drawdown that lingers for three years. The history table above carries the days-underwater column alongside the depth column for that reason. The 2024 mini-bear and any post-2025 corrections show as smaller basins on the chart — the new ATH at $124,773.51 on 07 Oct 2025 reset the running maximum, which is why the recent stretches read as fresh, shorter underwater windows.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. The lower bands are the accumulation discount Bitcoin has historically offered to patient buyers — a steady weekly purchase across the 2018 and 2022 deep-bear stretches dollar-cost-averaged into the mid-band of every subsequent recovery. There is no need to time around the chart; a multi-year horizon plus the maturation of cycle troughs does the work.

For a cycle-timing trader. Drawdown alone is too slow and too retrospective to time entries with. Pair it with at least two of Pi Cycle, MVRV‑Z, and the 200-week MA; the depth bands here are useful as a regime confirmation, not as a buy or sell signal. Given the trough-shallowing pattern documented above, the next bear is more likely to bottom shallower than −77% than deeper.

For a researcher. The drawdown series is reproducible from the daily-close history alone. Every value on this page comes from that series; the formula and the regime thresholds are documented in full on the methodology page.

Drawdown is descriptive, not predictive. It tells a reader where price sits relative to the highest close ever observed. It does not constrain the next print: a −55% drawdown can deepen to −80% before any recovery, and a −80% drawdown can sit at −80% for another six months before the bottom is in. Our own historical-readings table makes the point directly — the four cycle troughs on record range from −77% (2022) to roughly −86% (early 2015), with each leg down to those levels including bull-trap rallies and further extensions. History says where the historical floor has been. It does not say where this floor will be.

The four-year cycle that produced these troughs may itself be ending. Bitwise's Matt Hougan argued in late 2025 that the cycle pattern under which prior drawdowns sat may itself be ending: “The bitcoin halving is by definition half as important as it was four years ago” (Bitwise CIO memo, 23 Dec 2025), with ETF flows, regulation, and corporate adoption substituting for the older halving-driven dynamics. Lyn Alden has framed the same point as a liquidity-cycle reframe of the four-year mantra. If both are right, future drawdowns may not reach the −75-to-−85% range historical readings normalise around — they may bottom shallower, or take longer, or both.

Daily closes round off intraday lows. The 2010 and 2011 Mt. Gox-era flash crashes produced intraday drawdowns deeper than the daily-close numbers above. The 9 June 2011 incident is the canonical example. We use daily closes for the entire series for consistency with the rest of the site; intraday-true drawdown depth at the 2011 trough was meaningfully worse than the close-on-close figure.

Canonical questions from Google's “People also ask” block for bitcoin drawdown from ath, answered against the data on this page.