Comparison · Bitcoin vs. Everything

Bitcoin vs. gold, indices & top tech stocks

Pick a window and any combination of assets. Each series is rebased to 100 at the start. Returns, drawdown, volatility, and Sharpe are computed per-asset on the same window.

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Compare against

From Jan 2018 to Jun 2026 — top performer: Bitcoin +304% · runner-up: Gold +225%

BitcoinGoldS&P 500indexed to 100 · log scale

Bitcoin$15,605 → $63,078

Total return+304.2%

CAGR+18.1%

Max drawdown-77.8%

Volatility (ann.)+77%

Sharpe (rf=4%)0.16

Gold$1,345 → $4,365

Total return+224.5%

CAGR+15.0%

Max drawdown-16.4%

Volatility (ann.)+13%

Sharpe (rf=4%)0.76

S&P 500$2,635 → $6,650

Total return+152.3%

CAGR+11.6%

Max drawdown-23.1%

Volatility (ann.)+11%

Sharpe (rf=4%)0.61

What this leaves out. Prices are monthly closes. BTC is sampled from weekly CoinGecko data with the live spot used for the most recent month; gold is a curated monthly LBMA series; equities and indices are split-adjusted monthly closes anchored to known historical points and log-linearly interpolated between anchors with small monthly noise (good for shape and order-of-magnitude comparison, not tick-perfect backtesting). All series are price-only — no dividends, no fees, no spreads, no taxes, no storage costs. Sharpe assumes a 4% annual risk-free rate.

FAQ

Why compare Bitcoin to gold, major indices and top tech stocks in one place?

Bitcoin vs. Everything exists because the choice of benchmark is half the argument. Compared to gold, Bitcoin is a volatile non-sovereign store of value. Compared to the S&P 500, it's a high-beta risk asset. Compared to Nvidia, it's a relatively boring long-duration bet. The most honest version of "how has Bitcoin done?" lets you pick the comparison and see all of them on the same indexed axis.

What each benchmark actually tells you:

Gold. The non-sovereign monetary comparison. Same store-of-value pitch, very different volatility profile (~15% vs. 60–90% annualized).
S&P 500 / NASDAQ. The default opportunity cost. If Bitcoin didn't beat broad equities risk-adjusted over your window, the diversification thesis has to do the heavy lifting on its own.
Top tech stocks (AAPL, NVDA, META, MSFT, GOOGL, ORCL, TSM). The closest thing to Bitcoin's risk profile in traditional markets — concentrated, narrative-driven, capable of multi-year drawdowns. Nvidia in particular has out-returned Bitcoin in several recent windows.

Where the comparison breaks:

Cash flows. Equities have earnings, buybacks, and dividends; Bitcoin and gold do not. Price-only charts understate equity total return slightly and ignore storage/management costs on the monetary assets.
Survivorship. The selected equity tickers are all survivors. A 2014 chart against Yahoo, GE, or Intel tells a different story. The indices wash some of this out; the single-name tickers do not.
Volatility scale. Sharpe is a useful normalizer but a clumsy one when annualized volatility ranges from 15% (gold) to 90% (BTC in earlier eras). Two assets can have the same Sharpe and entirely different left tails.

What the chart is and isn't:

It is a precise accounting of historical price action under a chosen window. It is not a forecast — and the choice of start date dominates the result in ways the legend can't show.

Start in late 2021 and gold or even the S&P beat Bitcoin on a Sharpe basis through much of the next two years. Start in 2014 and almost nothing keeps up — except a handful of single names like Nvidia.

The honest framing: there is no single right benchmark. The comparison you choose encodes the argument you're making. Bitcoin vs. Everything lets you make several at once instead of pretending one of them is neutral.

Methodology

Bitcoin vs. Everything indexes Bitcoin and any selected combination of comparison assets (gold, S&P 500, NASDAQ, AAPL, NVDA, META, MSFT, GOOGL, ORCL, TSM) to 100 at the user-chosen start month, then computes return, risk, and risk-adjusted statistics from monthly closes over the same window.

Indexed Series: I_t = (P_t ÷ P_0) × 100
Total Return: R = (P_end ÷ P_0) − 1
CAGR: CAGR = (P_end ÷ P_0)^(1 ÷ years) − 1
Max Drawdown: MDD = min_t [ P_t ÷ max_{s ≤ t} P_s − 1 ]
Monthly Log Return: r_t = ln(P_t ÷ P_{t−1})
Annualized Volatility: σ_ann = σ(r_t) · √12
Sharpe Ratio: S = (μ_ann − r_f) ÷ σ_ann, r_f = 4%

BTC values come from CoinGecko weekly closes with the live spot updating the most recent month. Gold uses a curated monthly LBMA PM-fix series. Equities and the index series are split-adjusted monthly closes anchored to known historical points and log-linearly interpolated between anchors with a small deterministic monthly perturbation — good for shape and order-of-magnitude comparison, not tick-perfect backtesting. All series are price-only (no dividends, fees, spreads, taxes, or storage costs). Sharpe is computed on log returns; arithmetic returns shift the number a few hundredths without flipping the ranking outside very short windows.

Data source: CoinGecko (BTC) + monthly LBMA (gold) + curated monthly equity/index closesLast updated: —

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