Bitcoin Cash Investment Calculator
What would buying BCH have been worth? Pick a plan and a start date and this replays it against real daily Bitcoin Cash closes.
What BCH actually did, in the data this page replays
Measured from the 2,482 daily closes this page replays — 28 November 2019 to 13 September 2026, from Binance. Figures are bounded by that window, not by the asset’s whole life.
| History available | 6 years and 10 months (from Binance) |
|---|---|
| Bought on the first day, held to the last | 1.03× |
| Highest close in this window | $1,547.51 on 11 May 2021 |
| Where it sits against that high | 85.5% below |
| Deepest fall | −94.2%, 11 May 2021 → 9 November 2022 |
| Time to get back to that peak | still below it |
| Separate falls of 50% or more | 2 |
| Days spent more than 20% below a previous peak | 94% |
| Best calendar year | 2023: +168.3% |
| Worst calendar year | 2022: -78.2% |
| Annualised volatility | 96.9% |
BCH year by year
First close to last close each year. 2019 and 2026 are partial — the data starts mid-2019 and 2026 is still running.
| Year | Change | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | -5.9% | partial year |
| 2020 | +67.4% | |
| 2021 | +25.9% | |
| 2022 | -78.2% | worst full year |
| 2023 | +168.3% | best full year |
| 2024 | +62.2% | |
| 2025 | +33.1% | |
| 2026 | -62.1% | partial year |
The part the calculator does not show you
Held from the first day in this data to the last, BCH returned 1.03×. That headline is the easy part. The number underneath it is that the position spent 94% of all days more than 20% below a previous peak — so for most of the time you owned it, you were looking at a figure lower than one you had already seen.
The deepest fall took BCH down 94.2%, from $1,547.51 on 11 May 2021 to $89 on 9 November 2022 — 18 months of falling. BCH has not been back to that peak since. Anyone who bought on 11 May 2021 is still waiting, 5 years and 4 months later — which is the scenario a backtest showing a positive average return quietly averages away.
96.9% annualised volatility is ordinary for a major crypto asset and still several times a stock index. All BCH calculators →
Frequently asked questions
＋Would buying BCH on the first day of this data and holding have made money?
Yes — 1.03× from 28 November 2019 to 13 September 2026. The figure is real but it is also the single luckiest entry available in this window, and it required holding through a fall of 94.2% on the way. Set the calculator to a date you might plausibly have chosen instead and the answer usually changes a great deal.
＋What is the worst BCH has fallen?
94.2% in this data, from 11 May 2021 down to 9 November 2022 — 18 months of falling. It has not returned to that peak since, so anyone who bought at the top is still waiting. Bear in mind our BCH series starts in 2019; a deeper fall before that date would not appear here.
＋How often does BCH lose half its value?
2 separate falls of 50% or more appear in this data, and the position spent 94% of all days more than 20% below a previous peak. A drop of that size is not an exceptional event for this asset — it is a recurring feature of the record, which is the thing to size a position around.
＋What were BCH's best and worst years?
2023 was the best at +168.3%, and 2022 the worst at -78.2%. The gap between those two is the reason a single average annual return is a poor description of this asset: almost nobody experiences the average, they experience one of the two extremes depending on when they bought.
＋Is 6 years and 10 months of data enough to trust this backtest?
Reasonably. 6 years and 10 months spans roughly one full cycle for BCH — enough for the drawdown figure to mean something, not enough to call it a pattern. The assets here with a decade or more behind them support firmer conclusions.
What to keep in mind for BCH
BCH tends to track BTC's direction with a larger amplitude, and its sharpest historical moves came from fork events and hash-rate shifts rather than from ordinary market flow.
On-chain BCH fees are typically a fraction of a cent and do not spike the way Bitcoin's do, because block space is rarely scarce. Exchange trading fees will dominate your costs.
A backtest is one path that already happened. It shows what this plan produced through the exact sequence of prices BCH went through — not what a similar plan will produce through a sequence nobody has seen yet.