Rolling CAGR

Bitcoin Rolling CAGR plots four series, one per look-back window, on a shared linear axis capped at +300%. For every historical date, each series is the single yearly rate that would compound that day's price from the price n years earlier. The 1-year line is the most reactive — cycle tops and cycle troughs print near-symmetric prints of +100% and −80%. The 10-year line is the smoothest, and the newest: it begins 15 Jul 2020, the tenth anniversary of the first listed Bitcoin trade.

Today's readings: 1y −17.0%, 3y +40.6%, 5y +6.2%, 10y +67.5%. Spot of $78,199.03 auto-refreshes a few times a day in the browser; the four series rebuild overnight. The regime label uses the 3-year window as a single-halving proxy.

For every window n in {1, 3, 5, 10} years and every historical anchor date t:

CAGRn(t) = (price(t) / price(t − n × 365))1/n − 1

Calendar years use a 365-day count, not 365.25, so the look-back is day-accurate. Each series stays empty until n years of history have accumulated, after which it runs through to the most recent close. We render each line from its first defined date forward; the leading empty space on the chart is honest, not a bug.

The look-back date. When the requested look-back date does not have a daily close (rare; mostly an early-history artefact), we use the most recent close prior to it. Daily closes themselves come from the same series that drives every other chart on the site — provenance documented on the data sources page. The full derivation, including the 4-year regime proxy and the choice of 365 vs 365.25-day calendar, is on the methodology page.

Rolling CAGR is most informative when read across windows together. A bull regime where every line is rising tells you compounding has been positive across multiple horizons; a divergence — rising 10-year but falling 1-year — is the shape of an early bear inside a still-expanding decade. The regime bands below bucket the 3-year window because it sits closest to a single halving cycle. The 100%-per-year reference line on the chart is a mechanical anchor: the regime where every year doubled on average.

Reading the four windows at every cycle anchor surfaces the asymmetry of Bitcoin's compounding pattern. Cycle tops print very high 1-year CAGR (the preceding twelve months had been parabolic) and modest 10-year CAGR (a decade earlier the price had been on a similar slope, dampening the ratio). Cycle lows invert: deeply negative 1-year, still-positive longer windows. Each row anchors against that day's spot, not today's.

The cleanest single observation this chart produces is the long-horizon compression of the 10-year window. The series became defined on 15 Jul 2020, the tenth anniversary of Bitcoin's first listed market trade. Its peak reading was +238.7% on 01 Aug 2020; its trough was +41.9% on 28 Nov 2023. The lifetime average over the defined window is +109.1%. Today's reading is +67.5%.

The compression is mechanical, not a story about adoption. Each new day's 10-year look-back drops the earliest day in the prior window and adds today — and the early days carry the fastest percentage growth, because the denominator was tiny. The signature of a maturing asset is exactly this: the rolling long-horizon CAGR drifts toward something closer to equity-like rates as the early near-zero closes roll off the look-back. The drift will continue until the 10-year base is deep enough that no single year's contribution dominates.

Even after that compression, the average sits well above any major asset class on record. Charlie Bilello's recurring cross-asset return tables remain the cleanest place to read this against equities, gold, and bonds. The story is not that Bitcoin will keep compounding at 60% forever. It is that the regression toward a still-extraordinary mean is the regime we are in — and the mean is the reference line traditional-finance return tables look strange next to.

A short tour of the four lines. The 1-year line is the momentum measure: cycle tops print twelve-month gains in the 200-400% range and cycle bottoms print 60-80% drawdowns. The 3-year line sits closest to a single halving cycle and is the most useful regime classifier — the "Strong" and "Blow-off" bands above are calibrated on it. The 5-year line straddles two halvings; the 10-year line straddles two-and-a-half. The longer the window, the more the per-cycle euphoria smooths out, and the more the line tracks the underlying log-trend rather than the cycle.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. The longer windows are the ones that matter. A weekly buy across the post-2015 history has compounded between +41.9% and +238.7% per year on a 10-year horizon, with the lifetime average around +109.1%. The directionality of the 1-year line is largely irrelevant on a multi-cycle horizon. Use the 5-year and 10-year lines as the relevant context, acknowledging both will keep compressing as the chart matures.

For a cycle-timing trader. The 3-year line crossing into the Strong or Blow-off bands has historically marked late-cycle territory; crossing into Bear has marked drawdown bottoms. Pair with drawdown from ATH for the entry-relative read, rolling volatility for the regime-shape lens, and halving-cycle overlay for cycle-position context. CAGR alone is too coarse to time entries.

For a researcher. Every series is reproducible from the daily-close history under the documented 365-day calendar convention. The chart's distinctive contribution is the four-window juxtaposition; the compression of the 10-year window is the headline empirical observation. Methodology and the 4-year regime proxy live on the methodology page.

Anchor-dependent. Today's reading is a function of today's spot. Cross-cycle CAGR comparisons have to anchor on the same look-back logic, otherwise they are comparing two different questions. The cycle-anchor table above keeps the anchor consistent within each row but still mixes regimes across rows; treat the long-horizon convergence as the stable signal and the per-cycle prints as descriptions of the local cycle.

Whip-saw at the 1-year window. A 12-month CAGR computed off a single bear-market low can sit at −75% one week and at −30% the next, just as the look-back date moves through a different segment of price history. The 1-year line is best read for direction, not for level. The 3-year window absorbs most of that noise; the 10-year window absorbs most of the cycle.

Mechanical compression on the 10-year line. The compression from 200%+ in the early 2020s toward more modest figures is a denominator- base effect, not a slowdown of adoption. A correct read of the chart treats the falling line as the shape of a maturing asset's compounding history, not as a forecast of where forward CAGR is headed. Forward expectations need a forward model — not a backward-looking statistic.

Daily closes only. A purchase at an intraday wick that filled by close shows nothing here. Any practical CAGR an investor computed from a real entry will disagree with this chart by the wick-vs- close gap. For the same reason, the chart's print at any point on a volatile day can move several percentage points between morning and evening UTC even with no actual price action in the user's local time zone.

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