Uptober recalculated: 7 of 9 years at Bitcoin

With October 1 the same word comes back every year: Uptober, the claim that October is the reliably strong month in the crypto market and the fourth quarter the strong season. We ran the numbers for the four largest tradable coins over nine years, in each case from the September 30 close to the December 31 close, and additionally for October on its own. The result splits in two. For Bitcoin the claim does hold up in October, with seven of nine years in the black. For the full quarter it barely holds, and for XRP it does not hold at all.

This calculation is not a forecast. What has been counted is how often something happened in the past and, above all, how far the individual years lie apart. Base a decision on a season and you are basing it on an average that never arrived in any single year.

What Uptober claims, and how the claim can be measured

Behind the word sits a seasonality thesis: certain months deliver better returns on average than others, because capital flows, tax deadlines and expectations repeat over the course of the year. Seasonality in statistics means that a time-series value depends systematically on the calendar and not only on chance.

Two measures make that testable, and the order matters. The first is the hit rate: in how many years did the period end in the black? The second is the median, the value in the middle of all years. The median says more here than the average, because a single extreme year shifts the average at will while leaving the median alone. That is exactly what happens regularly in the crypto market, and further down you will see how strongly.