Crypto Market Recap Oct 3: Bitcoin Idles at $84,800 USD, Friday Did the Work
Bitcoin traded at $84,762.55 USD ($120,750.80 CAD) at 6:23 p.m. ET on Saturday, October 3, 2026, according to Yahoo Finance, up 0.31% in USD and 0.30% in CAD from Friday’s daily close on the same feed, the UTC daily close. That is a snapshot, not a close; crypto trades continuously and Saturday’s bar was still open when the figure was pulled. Ethereum sat at $2,687.42 USD ($3,829.99 CAD), up 0.72% in USD and 0.75% in CAD over the same window. The USD and CAD percentages differ slightly because the Canadian dollar moved too.
Saturday’s bar is quiet, but it isn’t finished
Saturday’s still-open bar has ranged from $84,434.45 USD to $85,014.48 USD, a band of $580, or 0.69% of where the day opened. Over the last 59 completed sessions, the median full-day range has been 2.33% of the open, and only 3 were narrower than Saturday’s partial band. That is tight for a bar with hours left to move.
The chart above plots Bitcoin’s daily range as a share of the open from September 13 to October 3, highlighting Friday’s 3.88% and Saturday’s partial 0.69% against the 59-session median of 2.33%. It is built from Yahoo Finance daily bars for BTC-USD and our arithmetic on them.
Friday was the day that did everything
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics released its Employment Situation report for September 2026 at 8:30 a.m. ET on Friday. Nonfarm payrolls rose 29,000, “following an average monthly gain of 45,000 over the prior 12 months,” in the agency’s own words. The unemployment rate rose to 4.2%, from 4.1% in August, though BLS notes the rate “has remained in a narrow range of 4.1 percent to 4.3 percent since March.” Three sectors did the headline’s work: health care added 17,000, construction 11,000 and manufacturing 9,000, a combined 37,000 among those three alone. Financial activities cut 7,000 separately. Health care by itself accounts for more than half of the 29,000 headline.
The bigger story was in the revisions. The BLS wrote: “The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for July was revised down by 31,000, from +21,000 to -10,000, and the change for August was revised down by 29,000, from +162,000 to +133,000. With these revisions, employment in July and August combined is 60,000 lower than previously reported.” The September and August payroll levels both carry the agency’s own “preliminary” footnote; July and June do not.
The release’s Technical Note puts a number on how much weight one month can carry: “the confidence interval for the monthly change in total nonfarm employment from the establishment survey is on the order of plus or minus 122,000,” with BLS analyses generally run “at the 90-percent level of confidence.” A gain of 29,000 sits well inside that band, so on the agency’s own measure, September’s payroll change cannot be told apart from zero. The 60,000 taken off July and August is a different kind of fact: a revision to data already collected, not sampling noise on one fresh month.
Bitcoin fell $3,385 in six hours
Bitcoin traded at $86,607.07 USD in the minute before the release and closed the 8:30 a.m. minute at $86,900.93 USD. By 8:31 a.m. it had printed $87,237.40 USD, the day’s high. It held most of that gain for about an hour, with its highest one-minute close at $87,083.12 USD at 9:39 a.m. Then it slid for five straight hours to a low of $83,852.30 USD at 2:47 p.m., a fall of $3,385.10 from the 8:31 a.m. high.
The chart above tracks Bitcoin against the CBOE 10-year Treasury yield index on October 2 as percent change from their 8:29 a.m. reading; by 2:59 p.m. Bitcoin had slipped to -2.73% while the index climbed to +1.01%. It is built from Yahoo Finance one-minute data for both series and our arithmetic on them.
Measured on daily bars rather than minutes, Friday’s full-day range came to 3.88% of the open, the widest session since September 23, on the sixth-busiest volume of the last 59 completed sessions. Despite all of that motion, Bitcoin finished the day just 0.42% below Thursday’s close. Ethereum fared worse, down 1.38% from Thursday to Friday. That is a sharp contrast with where the tape had been sitting: our recap from the previous Tuesday measured six Bitcoin closes packed inside a 1.1% band.
The 10-year yield index gave up the drop and then some
The CBOE 10-year Treasury yield index read 5.224 at 8:29 a.m. and fell to 5.159 by 8:31 a.m., a drop of 6.5 basis points in two minutes on the soft print. It then climbed to 5.298 by 1:28 p.m., the day’s high reading, before easing to 5.277 by 2:59 p.m., our last reading, well above where it started. The 5-year index moved the same shape: 4.989 at 8:29 a.m., 4.911 at 8:31 a.m., 5.079 by 1:28 p.m.
The first reaction said soft jobs, lower rates, and Bitcoin went up with that story. By early afternoon the market had taken the move back and then some. Our guide to what moves a stock price describes exactly this: markets react to how a number compares with what was already priced in, not to the number alone. Readers can trace the same path candle by candle on Bitcoin’s chart at TradingView.
Our own number for how tightly the two tracked
Across the 400 matched minutes from 8:20 a.m. to 2:59 p.m. ET on Friday, the two series’ levels tracked each other at -0.947, which is what the chart’s mirror-image shape actually shows. The minute-to-minute changes are a harder test, since two series that are each trending will track on levels whether or not they are responding to each other minute to minute: there, our own calculation puts the correlation between Bitcoin’s change and the CBOE 10-year yield index’s change at -0.241 (n = 399, t = -4.95). That correlation is weak, but a t of -4.95 across 399 paired minutes says it is a reliable one for that single day. It is also just one day, and it does not establish a standing relationship between Bitcoin and interest rates.
What 2,101 sessions say about a day like Friday
We screened every completed Bitcoin session from January 1, 2021 to October 2, 2026 (2,101 days) for ones with a high-to-low range of at least 3.5% of the open that closed within 0.5% of where they opened. Friday qualifies on both counts. Of those 2,101 sessions, 1,005 had a range that wide, and 61 of those also closed flat, 2.9% of all sessions and 6.1% of the wide-range ones. We ran the same screen back to September 17, 2014, the start of the available daily history: 4,399 sessions, 2,093 with a range that wide, and 137 that also closed flat, 3.1% of all sessions and 6.5% of the wide-range ones.
Direction depends on which window you ask. Since 2021, Bitcoin was higher next session 48.3% of the time after those days, against 49.7% for all sessions; mean return was -0.39% against +0.09%, a Welch t of -0.96 on that difference of means. Over the full history, the next session was higher only 44.9% of the time after those days, against 52.3% for all sessions; mean return was -0.96% against +0.18%, a Welch t of -2.35 on that difference. A signal that changes its answer depending on which decade you start from is not a signal.
Size held up better. Since 2021, the median absolute move next session was 2.23% against 1.37% typical; the mean absolute move was 2.87% against 2.04%, a Welch t of 2.51 on that difference of means. Over the full history, the median absolute move was 2.45% against 1.42%, and the mean absolute move was 3.66% against 2.27%, a Welch t of 3.68 on that difference. That result holds in both windows; the direction result does not. The edge still fades fast: in the 2021-onward window, the Welch t on mean absolute moves drops to 1.41 at five sessions and 0.76 at twenty.
So a day shaped like Friday says nothing reliable about which way Bitcoin goes next, but it has usually meant a bigger next session in both windows, even as that fades within a week. Saturday’s session is not closed, and as of the 6:23 p.m. snapshot Bitcoin is +0.31% from Friday’s close, against a median absolute next-session move of 1.37% across all sessions and 2.23% after days like Friday. A base rate is a distribution, not a forecast, and today is a clean illustration of the difference.
Hut 8 rose while Coinbase fell on a flat day for Bitcoin
Hut 8 (HUT.TO) closed up 4.13% at $127.94 CAD on the TSX Friday, and its Nasdaq listing (HUT) closed up 3.79%. The other miners were higher too: CleanSpark (CLSK) up 1.76%, Riot Platforms (RIOT) up 0.61% and MARA Holdings (MARA) up 0.18%. Coinbase (COIN) closed down 3.32% at $183.00 USD, and two US spot Bitcoin funds, IBIT and BITB, were down 0.48% and 0.44%. Four miners higher and the exchange lower, on a day Bitcoin itself finished 0.42% down. For a broader view of names like Hut 8, see our ranked page on Canadian crypto stocks.
The next rate decisions land October 28
The Bank of Canada announces its next rate decision on Wednesday, October 28 at 9:45 a.m. ET, alongside its Monetary Policy Report. The US Federal Reserve announces the same day at 2:00 p.m. ET. Friday’s jobs report was the last Employment Situation release either committee will see before those two decisions.
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. Bitcoin and Ethereum prices are a Yahoo Finance snapshot taken at 6:23 p.m. ET on October 3, 2026, measured against Friday’s UTC daily close on the same feed. Crypto trades continuously, so Saturday’s daily bar was still open. Intraday Bitcoin figures for October 2 are Yahoo one-minute data, and full-session ranges and volumes are Yahoo daily bars. Payroll, unemployment, sector and revision figures are from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation for September 2026, released October 2, 2026, and confirmed against the BLS public data API. Intraday yield figures are CBOE Treasury yield index readings from Yahoo Finance one-minute data, which are index readings and not Treasury par yields. The correlation figures and the base-rate study are our own arithmetic on Yahoo daily and one-minute data.
