What bitcoin’s historical patterns tell us about the sell-off

Yahoo Finance Video

Sun, February 15, 2026 at 4:00 AM GMT+9

In this video:

BTC-USD

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Yahoo Finance Markets and Data Editor Jared Blikre, who also hosts Yahoo Finance’s Stocks in Translation podcast, takes a look at bitcoin’s (BTC-USD) historical seasonality in order to shed some light on the cryptocurrency’s latest sell-off.

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To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination.

Video Transcript

00:09 Jared Blikre

With the latest drop in Bitcoin, everyone wants to know when the bottom is in, and there’s no way to really be sure of that in real time. We can, however, use history as a guide. So in today’s Stocks of translation, we’re digging into Bitcoin historical seasonality, looking for patterns that happen year after year.

00:25 Jared Blikre

Now, first, let’s take a look at how each month of the year looks from 2018 to 2025. And I’m using this time frame because 2018 was the beginning of institutional adoption of crypto. The first full year that we had Bitcoin futures. Prior to that, we had much bigger swings in Bitcoin. It was much more volatile than even now.

00:41 Jared Blikre

Another quick note, we’re using the median return instead of the average. That’s because Bitcoin’s huge swings make the averages themselves more volatile. So the median for January, for instance, is just the middle of all the January returns from 2018 through 2025, and we can see this is 5%. And February is 7%.

00:58 Jared Blikre

Now, obviously, that’s not what has happened so far this year, but the map is still relevant because things can revert back to normal. And so this future, these future months here can be an important guide. So let me go over one aspect of this chart, uh, that has to do with the coloring. If anything, if one of these bars is in green, that’s because it has a 70% win rate or better over time, and that’s again from 2018 to 2025.

01:14 Jared Blikre

If it’s red, it has under 40%. And if it’s gray, it’s kind of in between there.

01:17 Jared Blikre

You’re going to notice there are only three green months. So that’s February, July, and October. And that’s where you see those wind percentages high. And we also have some decent returns, 13% in July, 11% in October. What you also might notice is there’s a lot of red months. And that just means that Bitcoin has not done well a lot of the time. In fact, we find that Bitcoin results that are positive, they tend to cluster in very small areas within each year, and then Bitcoin tends to go sideways or it just uh kind of frustrates traders for a while.

01:48 Jared Blikre

So here we have our next map. And this instead of every day every month of the year, we have every day of the year. And I plotted both the median in blue and the average in white. And like I said before, the white, which is the average, tends to swing more wildly. And so it’s not surprising that it ends up at a higher place than the median. In fact, the median just kind of goes sideways for most of the year. and that gets back to my thesis that Bitcoin tends to frustrate traders a lot of the time.

02:15 Jared Blikre

And then in green, we have 2026 year to date and clearly, this year we are not following the historical map. In fact, this really reminds me of what happened last year, 2025 in stocks when we had that post liberation day sell off in all risk assets and things just kind of tanked. But what was really interesting is that just a few months later, things kind of reverted back to normal and the seasonality map became relevant once again.

02:44 Jared Blikre

So here we’re looking for a potential rise in March through May, and that’s something I’m going to be looking for as Bitcoin tries to find a bottom here, which admittedly could take some time. So we have 2023 through 2026 in blue here, and then in white, we have 2019 through 2022. So that’s the prior four-year cycle. And what you see is the peaks kind of line up here. And what you notice is that this market could keep coming down uh into the end of the year if we follow that prior analog, that prior four-year analog.

03:13 Jared Blikre

Um that would probably bring us somewhere into the 1940s or not 1940s, into the 40,000s. Uh so the fact is is that bottoming is a process and we’re going to have to uh exercise some patience here. No one has a crystal ball, but these maps can help kind of uh add some clarity. So tune into stocks and translation, the podcast for more jargon busting deep dives. New episodes can be found Tuesdays and Thursdays on Yahoo Finance’s website or wherever you find your podcast.

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