Stats › Long run returns › Bitcoin
Bitcoin against stocks
The argument you hear about bitcoin usually comes down to one claim: that it moves independently of the stock market, so holding some smooths out your ride. That is a testable statement. Somebody has measured it, more than once, and the answers are worth looking at before you decide what you think.
This page has three things. How closely bitcoin has tracked equities, and how much that has changed from one period to the next. How violently it moves compared with shares and gold, and what its falls from a peak have looked like. And where the US spot exchange traded funds stand, because those changed who can own it and how quickly they can leave. I built it because bitcoin is the one asset where people quote a single correlation number with total confidence, and that number happens to depend almost entirely on which years you picked. Once you see three legitimate figures for the same relationship, you stop treating any of them as the answer.
Nothing here is a view on whether you should own it. It's the measured record, from the IMF, the BIS, a fund manager and a couple of data shops, all listed underneath with their dates and windows. Where a source has an interest in the answer, I've flagged it in the notes. Read those flags before you quote any of this at anyone.
Bitcoin's correlation with the S&P 500 was 0.01 over 2017 to 2019 and 0.36 over 2020 to 2021 on the IMF's measurement, and 0.20 over the ten years to June 2025 on a fund manager's. It is not a stable relationship. Its volatility is: 54% annualised as of January 2025 against 10.5% for global equities and 15.1% for gold. It has had four drawdowns of 50% or more since 2014, including two above 80%, and stood roughly 52% below its late 2025 peak at the end of June 2026. US spot exchange traded funds have taken in a cumulative $51.4 billion since January 2024, but lost $4.08 billion in the second quarter of 2026 alone.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart and 5 named sources, roughly 1700 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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