What’s the best day of the week to buy or sell Bitcoin?

I have heard many Youtubers say that the price of Bitcoin tends to fall on weekends. Thus, if you are a buyer, you’d be better off by making your purchases on weekends. In this post, I show that while this may be true -on average- for Sundays, you may also end up paying a higher price than on any other days of the week.

To find the days of the week with the cheapest Bitcoin prices, I have used Coinmarketcap.com price data from April 2013 until February 2018. As is well known, Bitcoin prices have tremendously fluctuated during this period. Therefore, directly calculating the average price per day of the week would put in the same basket periods in which Bitcoin was $150, with periods in which it was $20,000. Thus, results would likely be distorted and would have little significance.

As an alternative, I have calculated the average price of Bitcoin in each of the 251 weeks in the period and have compared each daily price to the average price in its week. I therefore calculate, for each day of the week, whether the price of Bitcoin is above or below the weekly average price. The following chart shows the main results of this analysis:

This chart indicates that Bitcoin prices tend to increase over the week. For example, on Sundays, the price of Bitcoin has been, on average, almost 1% below the weekly price, while on Saturdays it has been almost 0.75% higher than the weekly price.

These data seems to support the claim that Bitcoin prices tend to fall on weekends. Well, at least, on average terms this has been indeed the case for Sundays. Saturdays, on the other hand, tend to have the highest prices.

Does this mean that you should buy Bitcoin on Sundays and sell it on Saturdays? The answer is NO for two reasons. First, this post is not financial advice, I am not a financial advisor, and I am just showing what I think are interesting facts. Second, the chart above shows average data over a 5 year period, but if we were to take a look at each specific week, we would see that the price on each day of the week could be way above or below the average shown above. To illustrate this, the following chart shows, in addition, the maximum and minimum prices that have been observed since 2013.

So, while buying Bitcoin on a Sunday could save you, on average, 1% of the weekly price, there has been a week since 2013 in which the price of Bitcoin on Sunday was 30% higher than the average price on that week! Likewise, there has been a week in which the price on Saturday was almost 30% below the average weekly price, implying that you have been better off by selling on some other day of that same week.

Please, let me know what you think about this post. If you have any suggestions for future analyses, let me know as well. Have a great week!