How much of its life has Bitcoin spent below its record high?
Most of it. Across Bitcoin's full weekly history, the large majority of weekly closes have sat below the prior all-time high — new highs are the exception, not the norm.
HalvingLens Research · Published 18 July 2026
of Bitcoin's weekly closes have sat below its prior all-time high
A fresh record high has been the exception, not the norm.
Share of all weekly closes, by distance below the running all-time high.
714 weekly closes · 2012–2026 · recomputed live from source.
It is easy to remember Bitcoin by its record highs, because that is when it makes headlines. The record itself understates how much of the journey is spent climbing back toward one.
Reframing the base rate this way makes drawdowns feel less like an emergency and more like the default condition of holding the asset — historically, not predictively.
- Weekly closes, reconstructed point-in-time across all cycles from 2012. Weekly observations overlap and are highly autocorrelated — they are not independent samples.
- Bitcoin's whole record sits within one long secular uptrend; a different price path would produce different base rates.
- This is descriptive history, not a prediction, signal, or advice. Past behaviour is not a guide to future results.
Reference this brief as HL-E001. Permanent URL: https://halvinglens.com/research/briefs/hl-e001
Is Bitcoin usually fearful or greedy?
Across the Fear & Greed record since 2018, Bitcoin's market has spent more days in fear than in greed — fear, not euphoria, has been its default mood.
What has extreme fear paid, one year later?
Since 2018, days of extreme fear were followed by much stronger average one-year Bitcoin returns than days of greed — the shareable one-figure distillation of research finding HL-R002.
HalvingLens Research is educational and historical in nature. It is not investment advice, not a prediction, and not a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Figures describe how the historical record behaved, within the assumptions stated. Past behaviour is not a guide to future results.