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 $65,837.03, the lifetime profitable ratio is 88.4% — 5,134 of 5,810 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 sage, while every fresh drawdown lengthens one. The whole picture moves with spot, which is why the same date can be a win one week and a loss the next.

The test is intentionally simple. 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 sage; the 30-day rolling ratio is the same share over a trailing window. There is no smoothing, no return-window anchor, no holding-period 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.

The headline statistic is genuinely high — but high for a reason that has nothing to do with whether any given buy date was safe. The ratio measures one thing: how much of the past sits below today's price. Bitcoin's long secular climb means that most of the past sits below most later prices, almost regardless of when you measure. That is survivorship dressed as success: the chart counts every day that has been eclipsed, and Bitcoin has spent fifteen years eclipsing its own history.

The tell is the timing. The profitable ratio peaks near 100% at exactly the moment spot prints a new all-time high — historically the worst time to buy — and it troughs at cycle bottoms, historically the best. So the obvious read (“high ratio means it's safe to buy”) is backwards. As a forward signal the lifetime ratio is close to noise, and what little edge it carries is contrarian. As a description of who is and isn't underwater right now, it earns its keep: the shape of the rust band tells you which cycle's buyers are still waiting, which is information no single summary number gives you.

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, and that is a distribution warning more than an all-clear. 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 — and those have been the best multi-year entries on record. Between 85% and 95% covers the bulk of trading days and carries weak signal on its own; pair the read with the cycle-shape lenses below.

Re-anchoring the test at canonical cycle dates — computing the ratio as if each named date were “today” — makes the inversion explicit. Every cycle top prints a near-100% ratio, because almost the entire preceding history sat at lower prices. Every cycle low prints a sharply lower ratio, not because the math changed but because spot fell back under enough recent days to widen the rust band. Read the table as a warning the high readings cluster on the tops. 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 a June 2011 intraday peak near $32 (the daily close topped near $29) to roughly $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 — with fifteen years of record now, no realistic drawdown can reproduce a sub-50% reading. The deepest buyer's remorse on this chart is, structurally, behind us.

A second cut: the longest consecutive run of rust segments at any anchor. Today's spot of $65,837.03 produces a 479-day stretch from 15 Oct 2024 to 05 Feb 2026 — the longest unbroken under-water window currently visible at today's spot. Because every close older than this window now sits below spot, the measure says nothing about whether prior bears ran longer when anchored at their own lows; the 2022 post-FTX bear, measured at its cycle-low spot, ran longer still. 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.

Every new ATH wipes prior rust — the number rewrites the past. Today's lifetime ratio is a function of today's spot, not a fixed historical truth. When Bitcoin cleared $69,000 in March 2024 it reclassified the entire 2021–2022 rust band as profitable overnight; when it later traded above the early-2026 highs the same will happen again. 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 peaks lie about safety. On 10 November 2021, with spot at its $69k all-time high, this chart read close to 100% profitable — the most bullish-looking reading it can produce — one day before the worst entry of the entire cycle. A buyer who took that 100% as reassurance sat underwater for well over two years — that day's $67k close was not cleared again until early March 2024. The chart's highest readings are mechanically tied to the moments you least want to buy; treat a near-100% print as a distribution flag, not a green light.

It 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 years and harvested several intermediate highs along the way — a December 2017 buyer at $19k was “underwater” on this chart all through 2018–2020 despite being free to sell at a profit during the 2019 rally. The chart does not know about realised returns. For a horizon-anchored read see rolling CAGR; for an entry-relative read see drawdown from ATH.

Daily closes only — intraday is invisible. An intra-day wick that filled by close does not register; the 6 March 2024 wick to ~$69.2k and the May 2021 flash crash to ~$30k both moved through prices that this chart never colours, because it reads close-to-close. Bitcoin's intra-day range is materially wider than its close-to-close range, so the segments understate both profitability and the depth of the rust. 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 — which is exactly why the 2011 all-time low is so extreme and cannot recur. The 365-day warm-up on the all-time-low calculation acknowledges this explicitly; pre-warm-up readings exist on the chart but are not used to anchor the headline statistic.

If you accumulate on a schedule, the chart is a picture of DCA's historical success rate at today's anchor, and the path-dependent rust band — concentrated near recent peaks — is why a steady weekly cadence buys disproportionately on sage days: that is simply where most days live, as time-in-band shows structurally. But do not read a high lifetime ratio as a reason to buy more now; the ratio is highest when spot is highest.

If you are trying to time the cycle, use the ratio contrarian and slow. A sub-90% lifetime reading has marked cycle stress — the better entries — and a near-100% reading has marked tops. Confirm with drawdown from ATH, which reads against the running maximum rather than spot, and rolling CAGR for the realised-return 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 buyers are still under water, and how long they have waited.