How long have Bitcoin DCA buyers actually stayed underwater?

Across 623 weekly start dates since September 2014, 73 are below cost today — about one in eight. The deepest is down 8.8 percent. The longest any cohort spent continuously below what it had paid in was 486 days, and every one of the 623 has been above water at some point.

Jon Phillips · 25 August 2026 · 3 min read ·Reviewed 25 August 2026

Bitcoin is 36.2% below its October 2025 high and has been for 323 days. That makes this a reasonable moment to ask a question most calculators will not answer: if you had been buying steadily, would you be down right now — and if you were, how long would you have stayed there?

The usual answer is an anecdote. This one is the whole distribution.

What was measured

Every Wednesday-to-Wednesday start date from Bitcoin's first daily close on 17 September 2014 to today — 623 of them. Each one buys $50 a week and holds. No selling, no timing, no changes. Then each cohort is marked against the closing price on 25 August 2026.

Nothing here is a projection. It is 4,360 daily closes and a schedule, and you can reproduce any row of it in the simulator. Where the numbers come from and how missing days are handled is written up in the knowledge base.

One in eight is below cost today

Every underwater cohort started between April 2024 and August 2025 — that is, within about sixteen months of the peak. Buy for longer than that and, so far, no start date has finished below what went in.

The worst case is worth sitting with, because it is unspectacular. A buyer who started on 13 November 2024 has paid in $4,650 and holds $4,242. That is the single most unfortunate week to have begun in eleven years of history, during a 36% drawdown, and it costs $408.

The longer question: how long do you stay down?

"Are you down today" is the easy question. The one that actually decides whether someone keeps buying is how long it lasts. For each cohort I measured the longest unbroken run of days where the position was worth less than the money paid into it.

The worst stretch on record belongs to people who started within days of the December 2017 top. They spent sixteen months continuously below cost. They are now up several thousand percent, which is easy to say in hindsight and was not easy to sit through.

The median is the more useful number: about three months. Half of all start dates never spent longer than that continuously underwater.

What this does not tell you

Three things, plainly.

Past distributions are not forecasts. Every cohort here benefits from Bitcoin having risen over the measured window. A period where it does not would produce different numbers, and nothing in this dataset rules that out.

Survivorship is baked in. This measures buyers who kept buying. It cannot measure the ones who stopped in month four, because they are not in the data — and the whole difficulty of DCA is that stopping feels most reasonable exactly when the numbers here look worst.

Fees, spreads and taxes are ignored. A real $50 weekly buy carries costs this simulation does not model.

Run it on your own dates

The figures above are one schedule — $50 weekly, held to today. If your start date, amount or cadence differ, the answer differs. Open the simulator and use your own.