Every October, crypto social media fills up with one word: Uptober. In 2026 the month started the way believers hoped. Bitcoin's daily price went from $83,482.51 on September 30 to $86,423.68 on October 4, a gain of 3.5% in four days (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). The Crypto Fear & Greed Index reads 70, in the band its makers label greed (source: Alternative.me).
So is October really a good month for bitcoin, or is it just a catchy word? The answer has two parts: bitcoin has risen in most Octobers on record, and that record is also too short to promise anything about this one. Both parts matter if you trade bitcoin this month.
What is Uptober?
Uptober is crypto slang, a mix of the words up and October, for bitcoin's habit of rising in October. On Coinbase prices published by FRED, bitcoin rose in 9 of the 11 Octobers from 2015 to 2025, with a typical gain of 14.4%. It describes a past pattern, and it gives no promise about the current month.
News sites use the word the same way. Cointelegraph calls it crypto parlance for October being a bullish month (source: Cointelegraph), and Fortune writes that traders named the month after its big gains (source: Fortune). The first use is hard to pin down. By 2021 the nickname was common in crypto news, and on November 1, 2021, Cointelegraph reported that "Uptober" had closed at a record high in bitcoin's best month of that year (source: Cointelegraph).
Traders like the word because it is easy to share, and a shared belief can move a market a little on its own.
How often does bitcoin go up in October?
Bitcoin went up in 9 of the 11 Octobers from 2015 to 2025, on the Coinbase prices that FRED publishes. The best was 2017, up 48.5%, and the two red years were 2018, down 4.6%, and 2025, down 7.3% (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
Year | Price at end of September | Price at end of October | October change |
|---|---|---|---|
2015 | $237.14 | $314.85 | +32.8% |
2016 | $608.99 | $696.90 | +14.4% |
2017 | $4,339.00 | $6,445.01 | +48.5% |
2018 | $6,605.00 | $6,304.18 | −4.6% |
2019 | $8,305.14 | $9,146.75 | +10.1% |
2020 | $10,783.24 | $13,745.02 | +27.5% |
2021 | $43,834.03 | $61,333.45 | +39.9% |
2022 | $19,415.80 | $20,472.79 | +5.4% |
2023 | $26,959.40 | $34,667.88 | +28.6% |
2024 | $60,790.00 | $69,467.29 | +14.3% |
2025 | $118,659.97 | $110,052.25 | −7.3% |
Each October change runs from the last daily price in September to the last daily price in October. FRED takes each daily price at 5PM Pacific (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). In some years its date labels sit one day away from the calendar day, so treat each change as close to the calendar month rather than exact to the day. BloFin's BTC/USDT Spot pair has traded since the end of 2023, so its monthly candles show the 2024 and 2025 Octobers and the one under way.
Across those 11 years, the median October gain was 14.4% and the average was 19.1%. The median is the middle result once you line the years up from worst to best, so one huge year cannot drag it around, which makes it the better guide to a "normal" October. From 2019 to 2024, bitcoin rose in six Octobers in a row.
How October compares with other months
October stands out even next to bitcoin's other months. Across all 140 complete months from February 2015 to September 2026, bitcoin rose in 57% of them, with a median gain of 3.1% (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). October's median of 14.4% is the highest of the 12 months, and February is next at 11.8%. September is the weakest month on average, with a mean change of −1.2%, and it has risen in only 6 of 12 years (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
Why websites show different October numbers
You will see other counts, such as a 2025 count of 9 green Octobers in the past 10 years (source: Decrypt), and counts like that differ for three plain reasons. The first is the start year, because some data sets begin in 2013 and FRED's Coinbase series begins in December 2014. The second is the data source, since each exchange or data firm records slightly different prices.
The third reason is the time window: a calendar-month figure runs from the last price of September to the last price of October. A rolling 30-day figure ends on whatever day you look. CoinDesk explained in November 2025 that rolling readings often include early-October highs, so they can show a steeper fall than the strict calendar month (source: CoinDesk). The data source and the hour of the reading matter too: Fortune reported bitcoin down 4% over 30 days on October 31, 2025, on Binance prices, while FRED's calendar-month change was −7.3% (source: Fortune) (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
Bitcoin's down Octobers: 2018 and 2025
The two red Octobers on FRED's record happened for very different reasons, and both are worth knowing before you lean on the nickname. October 2018 was a quiet month inside a long bear market, while October 2025 opened with a record high and then broke down after a wave of forced selling.
October 2018: A quiet month in a bear market
In October 2018, bitcoin was already deep in a bear market, a long stretch of falling prices. The month was strangely calm, as daily prices stayed between about $6,150 and $6,610, and Cointelegraph reported that Bloomberg called it the least volatile month in 18 months (source: Cointelegraph). Bitcoin still ended October down 4.6% on FRED's prices (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
The calm did not last. November 2018 fell 36.9% (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), and by late November CNBC reported that bitcoin had slipped below $3,500 for the first time in 14 months, down more than 80% from its high (source: CNBC). A quiet October was no sign that the bottom was in.
October 2025: A record, a crash and a red month
October 2025 started like a perfect Uptober, as bitcoin set its all-time high of $126,223 on October 6 (source: CoinDesk), a record it still holds, as the bitcoin all-time high history shows.
Four days later, on October 10, President Trump threatened a 100% tariff on Chinese imports. More than $19 billion of leveraged crypto positions were then liquidated within 24 hours, the largest such event on CoinGlass's record, according to CoinDesk (source: CoinDesk). Liquidation means an exchange closes a borrowed position because its margin has run out. Bitcoin finished the month down 7.3%, the first red October since 2018, and headlines declared that "Uptober" never arrived (source: Yahoo Finance). Sharp falls like this one are the subject of why bitcoin is dropping.
The lesson from 2025 is that a strong start to October says little about the end. A record high and a record liquidation came in the same week.
Why bitcoin has tended to rise in October
Nobody has proved why October has been strong, but analysts offer three explanations: a weak September that makes October's rebound look bigger, the Uptober meme feeding on its own attention, and the four-year halving cycle. Treat each one as an idea to test, since none of them is an established cause.
The first is a weak September. Analysts at the investment bank Compass Point told Decrypt that October gains have been helped by September's weakness, which makes the rebound look bigger (source: Decrypt). FRED's prices fit that idea, because September is bitcoin's weakest month on average.
The second is the meme itself, which can feed on its own attention. Jake Kennis, a senior research analyst at Nansen, told Decrypt that retail traders treat seasonal memes like Uptober as part of crypto culture, and that these stories can sway short-term sentiment and trading at the margins (source: Decrypt). If enough people buy because they expect October to rise, the expectation can push the price up for a while.
The third is the halving cycle: a bitcoin halving cuts the reward for mining new bitcoin in half about every four years, most recently in July 2016, May 2020 and April 2024. Bitcoin's last three cycle highs, in December 2017, November 2021 and October 2025, all came in the year after a halving, and the two biggest Octobers on record, 2017 and 2021, fell in those years too. Part of October's record may simply be the cycle showing up in the calendar.
Is Uptober real?
Uptober is real as a record of what happened and weak as a forecast of what comes next. Eleven Octobers is a very small sample: one more red year would cut the hit rate from 82% to 75%, and two big years, 2017 and 2021, carry much of the average.
Take out those two years, and the average October gain falls from 19.1% to 13.5%, while the median barely moves, from 14.4% to 14.3%. The typical October still looks good, but the eye-catching average owes a lot to two bull-market years.
Research points the same way. A peer-reviewed study of daily bitcoin returns from 2013 to 2019 found that October's average return was not statistically different from other months, with a p-value of about 0.28 (source: Kinateder and Papavassiliou, Finance Research Letters). A p-value that high means the October gains in that period could easily have come from chance. An earlier working paper, which used more than 15 million price and trading-volume records from seven exchanges, found calendar patterns in bitcoin that came and went and never stayed consistent (source: Baur and others, University of Western Australia).
The halving split tells the same story, because in the three halving years, October rose every time. In the three years after a halving, it rose twice, including the two biggest gains, and fell once, in 2025. In the other five years it rose four times. Groups of three and five years are far too small to prove a rule, so the record fits a cycle story about as well as a calendar story.
What the record does show is that a green October has been the usual result, and that a red one still happens. Treat Uptober as a reason to pay attention, and never as a reason to skip your usual risk checks.
Bitcoin in October 2026 so far
Even after its early-October gain, bitcoin sits about 32% below the $126,223 intraday record it set on October 6, 2025 (source: CoinDesk).
The Fear & Greed Index has read between 65 and 74, all in its greed band, on every day since September 26 (source: Alternative.me). The index measures mood, partly from price swings and trading volume, and a greed reading points neither up nor down on its own.
US policy is part of this October's backdrop. The CLARITY Act is the bill meant to split crypto oversight between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). On September 15, 2026, a Senate vote to start debate on it failed 49 to 50, well short of the 60 votes it needed (source: US Senate, roll call vote 234). The bill is stalled for now, and did the CLARITY Act pass tracks where it goes from here.
The regulators then moved on their own, and CNBC reported that two days after the vote, the SEC and the CFTC started building as much of the crypto rulebook as their existing powers allow (source: CNBC). The CFTC sent a crypto markets rulemaking to the White House for review on September 17 (source: Orrick). The White House finished that review on October 2 (source: OIRA, RIN 3038-AF80), and the text is not yet public (source: Orrick). On October 1, the SEC proposed rules on how investment advisers and funds can hold crypto for clients, with 60 days for public comment once the proposal is published (source: SEC). Neither is a final rule yet. Policy news like this is one of the usual reasons why bitcoin goes up or down in a given week, and it can matter more than the calendar. You can follow this month's moves on BloFin's BTC/USDT Spot trading page, where the daily candles show each October day's range.
Moonvember, Red September and other month nicknames
Uptober has company. Moonvember is the November follow-up, named after the crypto phrase to the moon, and Cointelegraph was already using it in November 2021 (source: Cointelegraph). November's record is much weaker than October's, with gains in only 6 of the 11 Novembers from 2015 to 2025.
The typical November gain was 6.6%, and the swings were wide: the worst November, 2018, fell 36.9% right after a red October (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). A bad October has been followed by a bad November twice, in 2018 and 2025, which is far too few cases to call a rule.
Red September is the gloomy cousin, the idea that September is a bad month for crypto. FRED's prices back it up only partly, since September has the lowest average of any month and yet rose in half of the years on record. It also rose in the last two: bitcoin gained 8.6% in September 2025 and 6.2% in September 2026 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). Every one of these nicknames describes the past, and each can break in any given year.
How to trade a month everyone expects to go up
The main risk in a famous month is a crowded trade. When many traders expect a rise, many open leveraged long positions, which are bets on a rise made with borrowed money. A sudden fall then forces some of them to close, and the forced selling pushes the price lower still.
That is what happened on October 10, 2025, when BloFin's BTCUSDT Perpetual fell 17.1% from its high to its low in a single day on BloFin's own price history. A leveraged long opened near that day's high, with its liquidation price less than 17% below its entry, could have been closed out before the day ended.
Start with your position size, the amount of bitcoin exposure you take on. Say you have 1,000 USDT and decide you will lose no more than 2% of it, or 20 USDT, on one trade. If you place your stop loss 5% below your entry, your position can be 400 USDT, because 5% of 400 is 20. You could open that 400 USDT position with 5x leverage and only 80 USDT of margin, and a hit on your stop would still cost about 20 USDT. Leverage changes how much margin you lock up, so the stop and the size are what control the loss. Higher leverage also moves your liquidation price closer to your entry, as how your liquidation price is set shows.
Then check the cost of holding the position. A perpetual contract has a funding rate, a regular payment between long and short traders that keeps the contract close to the spot price. When most traders are long, the rate usually turns positive and longs pay shorts, as how crypto funding rates work explains. Say the rate is 0.01% and funding is charged three times a day. On a 400 USDT long, that is 0.04 USDT per payment, or about 3.6 USDT over 30 days, close to a fifth of the 20 USDT you were prepared to risk. The rate can climb well above that when longs crowd in. A month-long Uptober bet can cost real money even if the price goes nowhere.
If you want exposure without leverage, buying bitcoin on the spot market removes liquidation risk, though the price can still fall. If you would rather follow an experienced trader, BloFin lets you copy BTCUSDT Perpetual positions from lead traders and set your own limits on size and leverage. A copied position moves in and out with the lead trader, so read how copying a futures trader works before you start.
Looking to trade BTC? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and navigate to the BTC/USDT Spot trading page, BTC/USDC Spot trading page, BTCUSDT Perpetual page or BTCUSD Perpetual page, or browse the lead traders you can copy on BTC.
Frequently asked questions
What was bitcoin's best October?
Bitcoin's best October since 2015 was October 2017, when its price rose 48.5%, from $4,339.00 to $6,445.01 on Coinbase prices published by FRED (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). The next three were 2021 at 39.9%, 2015 at 32.8% and 2023 at 28.6%, and five of the nine green Octobers gained more than 25%.
What was bitcoin's worst October?
Bitcoin's worst October since 2015 was October 2025, down 7.3% on FRED's Coinbase prices, and the fall from that month's peak was bigger. The month closed 11.8% below FRED's highest daily price of the month, which it dates October 5 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). The only other red October since 2015 was 2018, down 4.6%.
Is November a good month for bitcoin?
November's results swing more widely than October's. Its biggest gains came in 2017, up 53.7%, and 2020, up 43.5%, while 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2025 each fell by more than 15% on FRED's Coinbase prices (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). Both months rose together in six years: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2023 and 2024.
Is the UPTOBER token related to bitcoin?
Several small tokens use the UPTOBER ticker, mostly meme coins on Solana, BNB Chain and Robinhood Chain that borrowed the nickname (source: CoinGecko). None of them runs on bitcoin or is connected to its October price record, so their prices tell you nothing about whether October will turn out to be a good month for bitcoin.
Does bitcoin always go up in October?
Bitcoin has fallen in two of the 11 Octobers since 2015, in 2018 and 2025, on FRED's Coinbase prices (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). The green years also varied widely, from a 5.4% gain in 2022 to 48.5% in 2017, and four of the nine gains were under 15%.
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Fortune, Decrypt, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Alternative.me, the US Senate, the SEC, Orrick, Finance Research Letters, the University of Western Australia and BloFin, current as of October 5, 2026.
Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold bitcoin in any form. Bitcoin has fallen in October before, and a leveraged long opened on the strength of a seasonal pattern can be liquidated in a single day, losing all the margin behind it, while funding payments add a cost for every day you hold it. BloFin services are not available in restricted locations, including the United States. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.