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Bitcoin $BTC$79,620.75 trades 24 hours a day, seven days a week, allowing traders and fund managers to react to the news and manage risk at any hour, including weekends and holidays.
Yet out of 365 trading days a year, only a handful actually decide whether a year is a win or a loss. Which is why some experts say it’s likely better to buy and hold than to try to time bitcoin <a href="https://xpertsstudio.com/chainlink-price-rally-accelerates/” title=”Chainlink Price Rally Accelerates”>price swings for gains.
For example, in 2026, bitcoin fell about 9%, a mediocre loss, not a disaster. But without the five best-performing days of the year, bitcoin is down 36%.
Andre Dragosch, head of research at Bitwise Europe, said this is simply bitcoin’s nature. “Bitcoin is actually a relatively boring asset,” he told CoinDesk.
“The majority of performance is usually made in a handful of days, while most of the time it moves sideways and consolidates.”
That’s not a one-off event. Looking through bitcoin’s history since its earliest days in 2010, when it traded for mere cents, gains since then have consistently been concentrated in just a handful of trading days.
In 11 of the last 18 years, removing just the 10 best trading days, out of roughly 365, is enough to turn a winning year into a losing one.
2019 finished up 94% for the year, meaning prices nearly doubled. However, take away the 10 best days of that year, and it’s down 40%. Similarly, 2011 returned a staggering 1,474%. Strip out its 10 best days, and that shrinks to 2.2%, essentially nothing.
However, there were a few exceptions.
2013 and 2017 both stayed solidly positive even after removing their 20 best days apiece, genuinely broad, grinding rallies rather than a few violent spikes.
This pattern partially gave birth to the “c’mon, do something” meme — crypto Twitter’s running joke about bitcoin sitting dead still for weeks on end
Time in the market, not timing the market
This tendency for gains to cluster in just a handful of days makes precise market timing brutally hard.
A trader would need to enter right as a rally is about to start, because missing the mark by even a week or two often means missing almost the entire move.
The conclusion, per Dragosch, follows naturally – time in the market beats timing the market, since catching those handful of explosive days like a clockwork is close to impossible. Put another way, buying and holding bitcoin for the long haul is far easier and often far more rewarding than trading around it or running a fund whose performance is judged year by year.
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Source: cryptonews.net