Bitcoin fell back under $80,000 this morning, the day after the Federal Reserve held rates at 3.75%–4% in a 10–2 vote with two dissents for a hike (Yahoo Finance, 28 October). At 07:04 UTC on Thursday 29 October it traded at $79,858 on Coinbase, 1.7% below Wednesday’s close of $81,249. Is that the start of a pattern? Does the day after a Fed decision tend to go badly for bitcoin? We tested it on all 38 scheduled FOMC meetings since January 2022.
Short answer: it has leaned negative, but not by enough to call it a pattern. The day after the decision averaged −0.46%, with a standard error of 0.50 percentage points and a median of +0.03%. Bitcoin rose on 19 of the 38 days and fell on 19. If you drew 38 random days from the same period, you would see an average at least as low as −0.46% about 11% of the time, short of the usual 5% bar. This is a description of history, not a forecast.
Informational only; not investment advice. The statistics below are descriptive and the sample is small.
The numbers
| Window (UTC day) | Meetings | Mean return | Median | Std. error | Up days | Mean absolute move |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Decision day (day 0) | 38 | +0.49% | +0.14% | 0.51 | 21 | 2.23% |
| Day after the decision (day +1) | 38 | −0.46% | +0.03% | 0.50 | 19 | 2.20% |
| Two days after (day +2) | 38 | −0.05% | −0.12% | 0.41 | 18 | 1.82% |
| Cumulative, close of day 0 to close of day +2 | 38 | −0.50% | −1.09% | 0.66 | 15 | 3.28% |
| All days, Jan 2022 – 28 Oct 2026 | 1,762 | +0.07% | n/a | 0.06 | n/a | 1.80% |
| All Thursdays in the same period | 251 | −0.27% | −0.33% | 0.18 | 113 | 1.96% |
The day-0 row reproduces our earlier study of Fed decision days (+0.49%, standard error 0.51), which is a useful check on the data. The day-after row is new. Three features stand out.
First, the day is bumpier. The average absolute move on day +1 was 2.20%, against 1.80% on all days, a 22% premium. A random draw of 38 days would produce an average at least that large about 10% of the time, so it is suggestive but not conclusive. Ten of the 38 days fell 2% or more and five rose 2% or more; across all days the shares are 15.6% down and 16.5% up. The downside tail is the difference: the three worst day-after moves were −9.7% (16 June 2022), −7.9% (5 May 2022) and −5.2% (29 January 2026).
Second, part of the weakness is just Thursday. Because 37 of the 38 decisions fall on a Wednesday, the day after is almost always a Thursday, and Thursdays have averaged −0.27% in this period (251 days, standard error 0.18). Relative to an ordinary Thursday, the day after the Fed is only about 0.19 points lower, well inside the noise. That does not mean Thursday is a real effect; it means the benchmark for “weak” is not zero.
Third, it is not the same in every year. The yearly averages of the day-after return were −1.36% in 2022 (8 meetings, the rate-hike year), +0.03% in 2023, −0.20% in 2024, +0.23% in 2025 and −1.18% in 2026 (6 meetings). Most of the pooled weakness comes from 2022 and the first half of 2026, years when the Fed was either raising rates or markets feared it would. A 2026 mean built on six meetings carries very little weight.
Video: CryptosRUs’s stream from 28 October 2026, before the decision was priced in. Third-party commentary; the opinions in it are the presenter’s own.
Does it matter how the decision day went?
One natural idea is that a strong decision-day move gets reversed. The data lean that way, weakly. After the 21 decision days when bitcoin rose, the next day averaged −1.05% (standard error 0.79); after the 17 days when it fell, the next day averaged +0.27% (standard error 0.51). The correlation between the two days is −0.21, with a t-statistic of −1.29 — not significant on 38 observations. This meeting’s decision day was a gain, +0.56% on Coinbase candles (80,799.51 to 81,249.31), and today’s open candle is down 1.7% so far. That fits the weak mean-reversion tendency, but one meeting proves nothing, and the 29 October candle will not close until 00:00 UTC.
The last eight meetings
| Decision date | Day 0 | Day +1 |
|---|---|---|
| 29 Oct 2025 | −2.57% | −1.59% |
| 10 Dec 2025 | −0.72% | +0.53% |
| 28 Jan 2026 | +0.09% | −5.18% |
| 18 Mar 2026 | −3.62% | −1.87% |
| 29 Apr 2026 | −0.75% | +0.70% |
| 17 Jun 2026 | −1.80% | −2.36% |
| 29 Jul 2026 | +0.06% | +1.28% |
| 16 Sep 2026 | +0.71% | +0.33% |
Four of those eight day-after sessions were down and four were up, with the last two both positive, and the average of the last twelve is only −0.26% (standard error 0.80). The sample is too small to tell a trend from luck.
What would change the picture
The Fed is not the only event on the calendar. Today at 8:30 a.m. ET brings September PCE inflation and the first estimate of third-quarter GDP, the Bank of Japan decides tomorrow, and the market-implied odds of a December hike were 78.4% this morning (CME FedWatch via Coingabbar). A day-after study cannot separate the Fed’s decision from whatever else lands that day, which is a real limitation: on 29 October 2026 the same morning also carries a Samsung earnings miss, a 1.4% drop in Nasdaq futures and a 10-year yield that briefly topped 5% (Coingabbar, 29 October). Our guides to reading the PCE report and reading the Fed hike probability set out how to separate those threads.
Video: the Paul Barron Network stream of the Warsh press conference, 28 October 2026. Third-party commentary.
Method and limits
We used the decision date of each scheduled FOMC meeting from 26 January 2022 to 16 September 2026, 38 meetings in all, the same list as our day-before-the-Fed study. The 22 August 2025 notation vote is excluded, and the 28 October 2026 meeting is not in the sample because its day-after candle is still open. Returns are daily close-to-close changes in Yahoo Finance’s BTC-USD series (UTC days), from 31 December 2021 to 28 October 2026; the 28 October close is the Coinbase figure because the Yahoo row was incomplete at pull time. The p-values come from 20,000 random draws of 38 days from the full set of daily returns.
- Only 38 meetings: one −9.7% day shifts the mean by 0.26 points.
- A UTC day closes at 00:00 UTC (7 or 8 p.m. ET), so “day +1” is the first full session after the decision and includes everything that happened that day, not only the Fed’s effect.
- Day +1 is almost always a Thursday, which has been a weak weekday in this sample; we report the Thursday benchmark but cannot prove it is not chance.
- The decision-day outcome (hold, hike or cut) and the market’s expectations differ by meeting; we did not split on surprise because there is no clean public measure for the whole period.
- Past returns describe the sample, not the future.
Method: bitcoin prices, highs, lows and closes are Coinbase Exchange candles (UTC day) pulled by Bitcoin Mastery at about 07:05 UTC on Thursday 29 October 2026; the 29 October candle is still open at that time, so any closing figure quoted is the 28 October close (81,249.31) unless stated. Other third-party figures are attributed to their source and date. The statistical series is Yahoo Finance BTC-USD daily closes. Fed details are from the cited Yahoo Finance report.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are volatile and you can lose some or all of the money you put in. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold bitcoin, any exchange-traded fund, any listed security or any other asset, and the technical levels, probabilities and scenarios discussed are descriptions of published data, not forecasts. Do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.