Bitcoin Is Down 27% Since the October 2025 Crash. Its Comeback Base Rate Does Not Hold Up.
Bitcoin (BTC) closed at $82,546.32 USD on October 9 2026, 27.09% below the close it printed on October 10 2025, a day that fell through a 14.63% high-to-low range on the third-heaviest volume in its record. Bitcoin’s own history holds an obvious consolation: the 45 comparable days before it were followed by a median gain of 51.35% over the next year. That figure is real as a description of those 45 events, though 16 of the 45 lost money over their following year and the worst lost 79.02%. It also sits below the 71.74% median that followed an arbitrary earlier day in the same history, and the gap between the two is inside what chance produces from a sample this clustered. The consolation statistic is not a signal.
The anniversary tape is quiet. Bitcoin was at $82,771.19 USD, up 0.27%, or $118,082.17 CAD, up 0.28%. Ethereum (ETH) was at $2,493.48 USD, up 0.32%, or $3,556.85 CAD, up 0.32%. Those readings are live prices rather than closes, taken at 7:05 a.m. ET on Saturday October 10 2026. Prices from Yahoo Finance.
The candle ranked 66th. The turnover ranked 3rd.
Bitcoin’s high-to-low range on October 10 2025 was -14.63%, which ranks 66th of the 4,406 daily bars in its history. Its volume that day, 153,125,018,868, was the third highest of all 4,406 bars, a little over double the 74,653,009,425 of the day before. Ethereum’s -21.28% range ranks 20th of 3,257.
Third-largest turnover in the record on the 66th-widest candle reads as a positioning event more than a repricing. An enormous amount changed hands to move Bitcoin a distance sixty-five other days in the record have covered, two of them in the year since: February 5 2026 ran a 14.77% range and February 6 2026 a 16.19% one. The damage that Friday showed up on Ethereum’s chart rather than on Bitcoin’s.
A year later, neither asset has come back
| Bitcoin | Ethereum | |
|---|---|---|
| High-to-low range, Oct 10 2025 | -14.63% | -21.28% |
| Rank of that range in the asset’s history | 66th of 4,406 bars | 20th of 3,257 bars |
| Close one year later, Oct 9 2026 | $82,546.32 USD | $2,485.54 USD |
| Versus the cascade day’s close | -27.09% | -35.32% |
| Versus the pre-crash Oct 9 2025 close | -32.18% | -43.11% |
Every return here runs to the last closed daily bar, October 9 2026. The two sets of percentages measure different things, and the gap between them is the one-day drop itself, from the October 9 2025 close of $121,705.59 USD to the cascade day’s close of $113,214.37 USD. Drawdowns of this size sit well past the conventional line between a correction and a bear market.
Neither asset has recovered its pre-crash high. Bitcoin’s best close since the cascade was $115,271.08 USD on October 13 2025, three days after it, and its lowest $58,558.86 USD on June 30 2026. Of the 364 sessions since, 4 have closed above the cascade day’s close for Bitcoin, 1.1% of them; Ethereum managed 19, or 5.2%. Ethereum’s best close was $4,245.47 USD, also on October 13 2025, and its lowest $1,564.82 USD on June 25 2026. Set against the 45 earlier cascade days, Bitcoin’s -27.09% is the 11th worst of 46 and Ethereum’s -35.32% the 14th worst of 47.
What the year did not change is how much Bitcoin moves. Annualized from the standard deviation of daily log returns on closes, our measurement puts it at 43.9% in the year before the cascade and 44.6% in the year after. Ethereum went from 74.3% to 62.2%, about 12 points lower. Bitcoin is running at the amplitude the cascade found it at, roughly a third cheaper. The volatility that left the market left Ethereum.
What buying the panic actually paid
A cascade day here is a daily bar whose high-to-low range is -12% or worse, de-clustered so that no two events sit within 30 sessions, keeping the widest range in each cluster. Forward returns are close to close from the cascade day’s close. Both columns are restricted to bars dated before October 10 2025, so no cascade event on either side is selected from the post-crash year.
| Horizon | After a cascade day | After any earlier day | Difference | p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | +5.90%, 69% positive (n=45) | +3.11%, 57% positive (n=4,041) | +2.79 points | 0.36 |
| 90 days | +10.99%, 62% positive (n=45) | +9.48%, 61% positive (n=4,041) | +1.51 points | 0.85 |
| 180 days | +13.14%, 60% positive (n=45) | +31.37%, 66% positive (n=4,041) | -18.23 points | 0.15 |
| 365 days | +51.35%, 64% positive (n=45) | +71.74%, 72% positive (n=4,041) | -20.39 points | 0.38 |
The p column is a permutation test: twice the share of random 45-bar draws from the same population whose median is at least as extreme as the cascade-day median, which is the two-sided reading. Not one of the four differences clears chance, in either direction, and the test is generous, because it ignores the overlap between nearby events’ forward windows.
So buying a Bitcoin cascade day cannot be told apart from buying on no principle at all, at any horizon we can test. The point estimates lean negative past three months, and they are not strong enough to bank.
That is not an artifact of the single threshold. It also holds on the other cut we ran: taking the fifteen widest ranges in Bitcoin’s history after de-clustering, rather than everything past -12%, the one-year median is +67.34%, again below the unconditional +71.74%.
Ethereum shows no bounce at all in the point estimates, and its gap is no more testable than Bitcoin’s. Its 46 prior cascade days returned a median of -5.75% at a year, positive 46% of the time, against an unconditional +14.21% and 55% positive across 2,892 bars, at p=0.29. Its median is also partly an echo of the event being studied: 5 of those 46 events have one-year windows spanning October 10 2025, and dropping them lifts the median to -3.66%. Bitcoin’s set is clean, its last prior event being August 5 2024, whose window closed in August 2025.
The sample is thinner than its count suggests, which is why the p values read the way they do. Bitcoin’s 45 prior events fall in 11 calendar years, 8 of them in 2021 alone, 6 in 2015 and 6 in 2017, and their one-year windows overlap heavily.
The obvious objection is that the comparison measures a decade of drift, which an arbitrary starting day captured too. We tested that, scoring each event against the unconditional median of its own calendar year. Only 18 of the 45 beat their own year, 40% of them, and the median event came in 8.7 points below its own year’s median. Era drift does not explain the gap away. With 45 clustered events, 40% against an expected 50% is not a finding either.
One thing does separate October 10 2025 from the days the base rate is built on. Measured against its own trailing 90-day high, the median cascade day closed 23.39% below that high, across the 43 events where it can be computed. October 10 2025 closed 9.25% below, arriving near a high where most of them arrived after a decline had already run a long way. That looked like the explanation. It is not. Splitting those 43 events at 15% below their high, the ones nearest a high returned a median 67.34% over the following year and were positive 76% of the time, against 57.73% and 62% for the deeper ones. The difference runs the wrong way for the theory and does not clear chance either, at p=0.92. Arriving near a high cost past cascades nothing, so it does not account for this one.
Three Canadian miners, three different years
Measured from the October 9 2025 pre-crash close to the October 9 2026 close, in Canadian dollars, from Yahoo daily closes with no splits or dividends in the window:
| Oct 9 2025 | Oct 9 2026 | Change | Lowest close | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hut 8 (HUT.TO) | $65.07 CAD | $119.98 CAD | +84.39% | $47.59 CAD (2025-11-20) |
| HIVE Digital (HIVE.TO) | $9.85 CAD | $3.58 CAD | -63.65% | $2.44 CAD (2026-03-30) |
| DMG Blockchain (DMGI.V) | $0.56 CAD | $0.47 CAD | -16.07% | $0.22 CAD (2026-02-05) |
Bitcoin fell 30.99% in Canadian dollars over that same window. One of these three nearly doubled, another lost close to two thirds, and the third gave up half as much as the coin did. They are not a leveraged position in Bitcoin. They are operating companies whose paths separated completely, and averaging them into one verdict on mining would discard the only interesting thing in the table. For the wider field, we rank Canadian crypto stocks separately.
What a Canadian holder lived through
October 10 2025 was a Friday and the worst of it landed after the TSX had shut. Bitcoin was at $116,673.00 USD at 4 p.m. ET, the open of that hourly bar, when BTCC.B, the Non-FX Hedged class of the Purpose Bitcoin ETF, closed at $22.94 CAD from a prior close of $23.79 CAD. Its own high-to-low range was -5.28%. Monday October 13 was Thanksgiving, so the first Canadian print came on Tuesday October 14, at an open of $21.86 CAD, 4.71% below Friday’s close, before a holder could trade at all. The wrapper did not absorb the move. It deferred the mark by three days.
In Canadian dollars the year reads slightly less badly. Bitcoin closed at $117,748.20 CAD on October 9 2026, 30.99% below its pre-crash October 9 2025 close and 25.79% below the cascade day’s close. Against 32.18% in US dollars, a weaker loonie absorbed about 1.2 percentage points of the loss.
Against its own pre-crash close of $23.79 CAD, BTCC.B closed at $16.24 CAD on October 9 2026, 31.74% lower, with a lowest close of $11.56 CAD on June 30 2026. That is about 0.75 percentage points below BTC-CAD’s 30.99%. The fund’s stated management fee is 1.00% a year, with the MER capped at 1.50%, and the two series are struck at different times of day, a TSX close against a UTC-day close. Purpose’s own page describes it as the world’s first spot Bitcoin ETF.
Price is only one way to measure that fund. We have separately tracked how Canada’s first Bitcoin ETF has shed coins at every reading since July 2025, which is a change in what each unit owns rather than what it is worth. ETHH.B took the same shape, from a pre-crash close of $20.58 CAD and a cascade-day close of $19.01 CAD to $11.77 CAD on October 9 2026, 42.81% lower, with a lowest close of $7.39 CAD on June 5 2026.
Data as of the close of October 9 2026 for all return figures. Price data from Yahoo Finance; the Saturday readings are live.
Disclaimer: The content on bestcanadianstocks.ca is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions. Price data is from Yahoo Finance daily and hourly bars, and the Purpose Bitcoin ETF fund details are from Purpose Investments. Every return figure is measured to the October 9, 2026 close; the Saturday October 10 readings are live prices rather than closes.
