Profitable Days

Bitcoin Profitable Days plots every daily close since 18 July 2010 on a logarithmic price axis, coloured by a single test: would today's spot show a paper profit if you had bought on that day? Sage segments are wins; rust segments are coins still underwater at the current price. The shaded vertical band marks the longest consecutive unprofitable stretch on the record.

At today's spot of $78,199.03, the lifetime profitable ratio is 92.2% — 5,314 of 5,765 historical closes sit below it. The chart is path-dependent by construction: a single ATH lifts the leading edge of the longest unprofitable window into the green, while every fresh drawdown lengthens one. Spot auto-refreshes a few times a day in the browser; the dataset itself rebuilds nightly.

The test is intentionally trivial. For every historical close d:

profitable(d) = price(today) > price(d)

Sage means true, rust means false. The lifetime ratio is the share of days where the test resolves green; the 30-day rolling ratio is the same share over a trailing window. There is no smoothing, no return-window anchor, no cohort cohort — just spot today against close on day d.

The reference is literally today. This is the chart's defining design choice and its main source of confusion. A day's colour can flip back and forth as spot moves through that day's old close. There is no “profitable after one year” or “profitable on a five-year hold” framing — those are legitimate alternative questions, but they answer something different. The full derivation, including the choice of daily close versus intraday wick, is on the methodology page.

Profitable Days is most informative at the extremes. A lifetime ratio above 97% has only fired during the most expansive cycle phases — a chart that is almost entirely sage tells you spot has just printed a new ATH against most of the prior history. A ratio below 80% has only fired during deep bears, where the preceding cycle's run had pushed enough days above today's spot to widen the rust band materially. Between 85% and 95% covers the bulk of trading days and carries weak signal on its own; pair the read with cycle-shape lenses below.

Reading the lifetime ratio at canonical cycle anchors makes the path-dependent shape explicit. Every cycle top has printed a near-100% ratio (almost the entire preceding history sat at lower prices). Every cycle low has printed a sharply lower ratio — not because the math changed, but because spot fell back under enough recent days to widen the rust band. The 99bitcoins obituaries archive is a useful sentiment cross-check at the deeper bears.

The cleanest single number this chart produces is the all-time-low ratio — the date in Bitcoin's history where the smallest fraction of preceding closes would have been profitable buys. After a 365-day warm-up to give the early history room to develop, the minimum is 58.0% on 20 Nov 2011, with spot at $2.20. That print sits in the depths of the post-Mt-Gox 2011 bear — the slide from $32 in June 2011 to $2 in November 2011, after the Mt Gox 19 June 2011 hot-wallet incident and the cascade of secondary failures that followed. With sixteen months of trading on record, an anchor at the bottom left more than four-tenths of the preceding closes above current spot.

The recovery is the more useful half of the story. The 2013 bull run pushed Bitcoin from $2 to over $1,100 in roughly two years, mechanically converting the 2010 and 2011 rust segments to sage as spot cleared every prior daily close. The lifetime ratio rebounded above 90% 257 days later, on 03 Aug 2012 at $10.92 and has not revisited the sub-60% regime since. Subsequent cycle bottoms (2015, 2018, 2022) shaved the lifetime ratio by 10–15 percentage points but stayed above 80%. The all-time low belongs to the era when there was simply not enough history to absorb a single-cycle drawdown.

A second cut: the longest consecutive run of rust segments at any anchor. Today's spot of $78,199.03 produces a 298-day stretch from 10 Apr 2025 to 01 Feb 2026 — the longest unbroken under-water window since the 2018 bear. Every close inside that window printed above spot today, and stayed above; the front edge advances each day spot fails to clear the early-2026 highs.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. The chart is a picture of DCA's historical success rate at today's anchor. Sustained ratios above 90% mean the average past dollar would have been a winning purchase; the asymmetry of the path-dependent rust band — concentrated near recent peaks — means a steady weekly cadence buys disproportionately on sage days simply because that is where most of the days live. Treat sub-90% lifetime readings as historically rare regimes, not as a forward signal.

For a cycle-timing trader. The lifetime ratio is a slow signal, better used for confirmation than for entry. Pair Profitable Days with drawdown from ATH — which reads against the running maximum rather than current spot — and rolling CAGR for the realised-return cohort lens. The chart's distinctive contribution is not the live number but the shape of the rust band on the price line: which cycle's purchases are still under water.

For a researcher. The metric is path-dependent and trivially reproducible from the daily-close history. The all-time-low ratio, the longest stretches, and the cycle-anchor table all recompute nightly under the live series; the methodology page records the warm-up choice and the daily-close anchor. Alternative framings (rolling-window profitability, holding-period profitability) are valid and complementary; they are different questions.

Path-dependent — every new ATH wipes prior rust. Today's lifetime ratio is a function of today's spot, not a fixed historical truth. A single new all-time high lifts the leading edge of the longest unprofitable window into the green, sometimes by months at a time. Any cross-cycle comparison of the lifetime ratio has to anchor on the same spot, otherwise the number is comparing two different questions. The cycle-anchor table above anchors each cycle at its spot; that is the apples-to-apples view.

The ratio is anchored on today, not on horizon. Coins bought near a cycle peak read as “unprofitable” here even if a buyer has held them for ten years and harvested several intermediate highs along the way. The chart does not know about realised returns. For a horizon-anchored read see rolling CAGR; for an entry-relative read see the per-cycle drawdown line.

Daily closes only. An intra-day wick that filled by close does not register; an intra-day flash above today's spot does not flip the day to profitable. Bitcoin's intra-day range is materially wider than its close-to-close range, and the chart's segments understate both profitability and drawdown by that gap. A cleaner real-time read would use five-minute candles; we use daily closes for cross-chart consistency.

The early-history ratio is unstable. The first few hundred trading days have so little context that a single price tick re-orders the ratio meaningfully. The 365-day warm-up on the all-time-low calculation acknowledges that explicitly — pre-warm-up readings exist on the chart but are not used to anchor the headline statistic.

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