Bitcoin is Up 90% Year to Date

Bitcoin stands at $55,000 today, as of writing these lines. This means it’s about 90% up since the beginning of 2021.

While that’s impressive on its own, what’s even more notable is BTC’s performance compared to other well-known investment tools such as some of the most popular stock market indexes, the world’s largest companies, and precious metals like gold and silver.

S&P500 and Nasdaq Left Behind

The primary cryptocurrency entered 2021 at roughly $28.9k before it shot up to unseen heights in April at $65,000, which became the current all-time high. What followed were a few turbulent months prompted by FUD, initially from Elon Musk and later from China.

After it bottomed below $30,000 in July, BTC resumed its bullish run and has nearly doubled its value to $55,000 as of writing these lines. More specifically, it means it’s almost 90% up year-to-date.

While speculations run wild where it can end the year, with $100,000 being the prevalent opinion, it’s worth exploring how bitcoin compares to other assets from the more traditional financial spheres.

Let’s start with arguably the most popular stock market index – the S&P 500, which tracks the performance of the 500 largest companies listed on US exchanges. It has actually performed well this year – entered at 3,700, charted a new ATH in early September at 4,520, but has retraced slightly to 4,391 as of Friday’s closing. Meaning, it’s up by roughly 18% in ten months.

At the same time, the Nasdaq Composite index has registered a bit more modest gains since the start of the year – just under 15%. Interestingly, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has increased by a very similar percentage in the same time frame.

Let’s look at single stocks of the world’s most prominent companies. Apple’s shares are up by 10% YTD, Microsoft’s YTD ROI is 35%, Amazon’s by just 3%, Facebook’s (23%), and Tesla’s by 7.5%.

Google (Alphabet, symbol GOOG) has been among the best performers, with a notable 61% YTD increase. Yet, none of them is anywhere close to bitcoin in terms of yearly gains.

Bitcoin Vs. Gold Vs. Silver

Being regarded by many as digital gold, it’s also worth comparing the cryptocurrency with the yellow metal and perhaps silver as well. After all, silver’s market capitalization is still larger than bitcoin’s, at least according to 8marketcap.com.

The two metals should be particularly popular these days, giving the global economic uncertainty and the increasing inflation. Yet, gold – arguably the most utilized store of value instrument historically – is down since the start of the year. It has declined by more than 7%, despite being slightly in October.

Silver’s situation is even worse as it has dropped by 17% against the dollar year-to-date.

Consequently, neither one of the two most popular precious metals can even come close to bitcoin in terms of yearly gains, at least as of October. As such, it’s not that big of a surprise that many prominent names, such as Anthony Scaramucci, Steve Wozniak, and Michael Saylor, have described bitcoin as the better option than gold.

It’s also worth noting that the cryptocurrency became the best-performing asset last century with an ROI of 8,900,000%.