Rolling CAGR

Bitcoin Rolling CAGR plots four series, one per look-back window, on a shared linear axis capped at +450%. 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 — at a cycle top, after a parabolic twelve months, it has printed well into the hundreds of percent (the cycle-anchor table below shows over +800% at the 2021 April top and far higher in earlier cycles); at a cycle low, after twelve months of bear, it bottoms near −80%. The 10-year line is the smoothest, and the newest: it begins 15 Jul 2020, ten 365-day look-backs after the first daily close in our series (18 July 2010) — a few days before the calendar anniversary, because the 365-day convention loses ground to leap years over a decade.

Today's readings: 1y −37.6%, 3y +37.1%, 5y +10.3%, 10y +56.4%, against a spot of $65,837.03. The regime label uses the 3-year window as a single-halving proxy. The whole point of stacking the four lines is the comparison: the gap between the 1-year and the 10-year reading is a direct measure of how much of any given return was timing versus tenure.

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 10-year line simply has no defined value before 15 Jul 2020.

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 3-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, not one line at a time. A bull regime where every line is rising tells you compounding has been positive across multiple horizons. A divergence — a rising 10-year next to a falling 1-year — is the shape of an early bear inside a still- expanding decade, which is exactly the configuration most cycle bottoms have shown. The wider the fan between the four lines, the more cycle-dependent the recent return; the tighter the fan, the more the asset is behaving like a steady compounder. 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 marks the regime where every year, on average, doubled.

Reading the four windows at every cycle anchor is the cleanest test of the signal-versus-noise claim. Cycle tops print very high 1-year CAGR (the preceding twelve months had been parabolic) and far more modest 5- and 10-year CAGR. Cycle lows invert: deeply negative 1-year, yet still-positive longer windows. The column that matters is the 10-year reading — scan it down the table and notice it never turns negative, not even at the post-FTX low. Each row anchors against that day's spot, not today's, so the rows are a fair cross-section of "what would the windows have said on the day".

Across 2,162 defined days, the 10-year rolling CAGR has never once printed negative. Its lowest reading is +41.9% on 28 Nov 2023 — and that low is an arithmetic of the look-back base, not a recent-price event: it lands on the day the 10-year-prior close sat at the previous cycle's top run-up, not at any contemporaneous market bottom — and its peak is +238.7% on 01 Aug 2020. The lifetime average over the defined window is +108.2%; today's reading is +56.4%. That floor is the strongest signal on the page: a decade of holding has survived every drawdown the asset has thrown at it.

The 1-year window is the counterpoint, and the noise. It has spent roughly a quarter of its defined history underwater — a 1-year CAGR computed off a single bear-market low can read −75% one week and −30% the next, with no change in the underlying thesis, simply because the look-back date moved through a different slice of price history. The 3-year window is the hinge: it has been negative on roughly one day in a hundred and a half, almost all of them in late 2016–2017 — three years past the 2013 top — with a few early-2024 days. So the empirical hierarchy is unambiguous — tenure is signal, timing is noise, and the crossover happens somewhere between the one-year and three-year windows.

That durable floor sits inside a structurally falling line, and the two facts are not in tension. The 10-year CAGR peaked at +238.7% in the early 2020s and has trended lower since — not monotonically: it fell to its all-time low of +41.9%, rebounded through 2024 and into 2025, and now reads +56.4%, comfortably above that floor. The secular direction is down, and the cause is mechanical, not a story about adoption: each new day's look-back drops the earliest day of the prior window and adds today — and the early days carry the fastest percentage growth, because the denominator was a few dollars. As the near-zero 2010 closes roll off the base, the headline number drifts toward something closer to equity- like rates. The drift will continue until the 10-year base is deep enough that no single early year dominates the ratio.

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 honest framing is not that Bitcoin compounds at +108.2% forever; it is that the line is regressing toward a still-extraordinary mean, and that the regression is the regime, not a breakdown.

The 1-year window whip-saws at every cycle turn. The 1-year line is direction, not level. In the twelve months after the November 2021 top it plunged from triple-digit positive to roughly −75% by the FTX Chapter 11 filing on 11 November 2022; in the twelve months off the 21 November 2022 low it swung back to strongly positive. Same asset, same chart, opposite verdict — the only thing that changed was which slice of price the look-back landed on. Read it for sign and slope, never as a return you can expect to repeat.

The look-back anchor is silent about the path. Two dates with an identical 3-year CAGR can have travelled wildly different roads — one a smooth grind, one a +400%/−77% round trip. A holder who bought the April 2021 local top and one who bought the July 2021 capitulation have held the same span to today, yet lived through completely different drawdowns — and, because the two entry prices differed by roughly 2×, ended on very different long-window CAGR. CAGR collapses the whole journey to two endpoints; pair it with drawdown to recover the path it discards.

The 10-year line's decline is not deterioration. The compression from 200%+ toward the current figure is a denominator-base artefact of the 2010 closes ageing out of the window. Misread as a trend in forward returns, it would have told you to sell every year since 2021 — through two of the largest rallies in the asset's history. A backward statistic cannot forecast; that job belongs to a forward model.

Daily closes only, and a moving live print. A purchase at an intraday wick that filled by close shows nothing here, so any CAGR an investor computed from a real entry will disagree with this chart by the wick-versus-close gap. And because the spot recompute runs against live price, the on-page 1-year number can move several tenths of a percent across a single volatile UTC day with no action at all in the reader's local hours.

If you accumulate on a schedule, read only the long windows. A weekly buy held across multiple cycles has, on a 10-year horizon, compounded inside the +41.9%–+238.7% band with a lifetime average near +108.2%. The sign of the 1-year line is largely irrelevant to you — it describes a holding period you are not running. Anchor expectations to the 5- and 10-year lines, and accept that both will keep compressing as the chart matures.

If you are timing the cycle, watch the 3-year window cross between regime bands. Crossing into Strong or Blow-off has historically marked late-cycle territory; the rare crossing into Bear has marked the deep-drawdown bottoms. But CAGR is far too coarse to call an entry on its own — pair it with drawdown from ATH for the entry-relative read and the halving-cycle overlay for cycle position.