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It’s the eternal question of every trader: when will the price go up, and when will the price go down?
There’s no way of knowing for sure, but it’s always worth considering different historical factors to analyze how other traders have behaved in the past. For example, do people tend to buy or sell more at certain times of the day, or on certain days of the week?
Around a year ago, we looked into this by doing an analysis of price trends by day and hour. But a lot has changed in the Bitcoin world since then! We decided to take another look and see what Bitcoin’s price and volume trends have looked like in 2020 and so far in 2021.
Specifically, we analyzed hourly Bitcoin price highs and lows, as well as trading volume data, from Gemini via CryptoDataDownload, starting with January 1, 2020, and ending on Feb 22, 2021. To get the data point “high” price for Monday at 1 AM, for example, we took the “high” price on Gemini for every Monday at 1 AM UTC and averaged them to find the mean BTC price at that time over the past 14 months.
So what did we find? On average, Bitcoin has tended to start low, and its price climbs slowly over the course of the week. On average, it has reached its weekly high point on Saturdays or Sundays. Overall, it’s remarkable how steady the pattern is — there aren’t major swings to exploit, just a smooth upward trend.
Stronger up-and-down patterns are evident with daily trading volume, although there’s not much unexpected here. Trading seems to peak around 16:00 UTC (11 AM EST) on workdays, which makes sense — the Gemini exchange caters primarily to North American and European users, so spikes at times when their regular working hours overlap make sense. Trading volumes are, on average, lower on the weekends, which also makes sense.
While these trends are interesting, it’s important not to get carried away. They don’t necessarily hold any predictive power, and it’s very unlikely that these microtrends, averaged over more than a year of hourly trading, could overpower larger market forces. In other words: if Bitcoin’s price is rocketing upward on a Sunday night, don’t expect it to start dropping at midnight just because that is, on average, what has happened over the past year.
