Monday highs and Friday lows: Bitcoin price daily and hourly moving patterns

Source: LongHash

The question that traders are most concerned about is: when can I buy and when can I sell? The purpose is naturally to sell high and buy low, but the difficulty lies in how do you determine when is "high" and when is "low"?

To find out the pattern of Bitcoin price movement, we analyzed the hourly price data of Bitcoin from Coinbase for the past two years (via CryptoDataDownload). We divided the data into prices per hour per day, per week, and then sorted out the average of the opening price, closing price, highest price, and lowest price per hour. For example, the opening price at 1 a.m. on Monday was obtained by collecting the average of the Bitcoin price at 1 a.m. every Monday from Coinbase for the past two years.

It is safer to analyze two years of data (February 6, 2018 to February 6, 2020), during which the fixed combination of seven days of the week and every hour (such as 1 a.m. on Monday) appeared 104 times each. In addition, considering the sharp rise and fall of Bitcoin in late 2017 and early 2018, the data during this period is more reflective of the state of "modern" Bitcoin than more distant historical data.

Here are our findings.

In the past two years, the low price of Bitcoin tends to appear at 6:00 am UTC every Friday, and the prices on Thursday and Friday are generally lower than other times of the week. The high price of Bitcoin tends to appear at midnight on Monday/00:00 on Tuesday UTC, and there is also a peak around 1:00 pm on Wednesday.

The opening prices at midnight Monday and midnight Tuesday UTC were, on average, $170 higher than the opening prices at 6:00 AM Friday.

It is important to remember that we are talking about averages here. Averages can reflect broad trends over the past two years, but they are not predictive and cannot be compared to macro trends such as big bull or bear markets. Therefore, the data in this article should obviously not be regarded as any investment advice.

As for why this trend occurs, we can only speculate: Monday midnight and Tuesday midnight UTC are 7pm EST and 8am China time, which is when most traders are active. However, we also analyzed the hourly trading volume data and did not see a significant spike in trading volume during the same period.

On the other hand, the low prices around 6am UTC on Friday morning are relatively consistent with the lower average volume during the same time period (although the volume during this time period is not the lowest). 6am UTC is 1am ET, which is a time when US and European traders are tired at the end of the work week and are less likely to trade during this time, resulting in lower volume.

LongHash, understand blockchain with data.