Running ROI (1y)
Rolling 1-year return on investment, in percent.
Understanding this chart
Each point answers one question: if you had bought exactly one year earlier, what would your return be today? A reading of +150% means price is 2.5× what it was a year ago; −50% means it halved.
The chart makes Bitcoin's cyclicality unmissable: the 1-year ROI oscillates in huge waves, from several-hundred-percent peaks in bull manias to −70%+ troughs in bear-market capitulations. The zero line is the regime boundary — extended time below it has historically been the accumulation phase, and the steep climbs off the lows mark new cycle beginnings.
Note the diminishing amplitude across cycles: early peaks reached +9,000%, recent ones in the hundreds. That decay of returns as Bitcoin's market cap grows is one of the core arguments behind the log-regression approach used elsewhere on this site.