Bitcoin Breaks $65K, as Price Action Compared to Prior U.S. Election Cycles

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Bitcoin (BTC) rose above $65,000 in U.S. morning trading hours Monday as the S&P 500 index opened to fresh highs, with some traders arguing that historical price patterns witnessed ahead of prior U.S. presidential elections might offer a reason to be bullish ahead of November’s upcoming vote.
BTC is up 4% in the past 24 hours, data shows, with the broad-based CoinDesk 20 (CD20), a liquid fund tracking the largest tokens, up 3.1%.
SPX rose 14.8 points, or 0.25%, at the open to 5,829.81 ahead of a week packed with corporate earnings and economic data, per Reuters.
BTC rallied from $62,000 to $65,000 since early Asian hours Monday, liquidating over $80 million of BTC and ether (ETH) leveraged shorts – or bets against the tokens. The early move came on renewed hopes of a future stimulus for Chinese markets, which tends to move riskier assets, including cryptocurrencies.
Trading firm QCP Capital said the move was similar to BTC’s price action in 2016 and 2020 before the U.S. elections.
“If we look back to 2016, BTC traded in a very tight range for over 3 months,” QCP traders said in a broadcast message. “It wasn’t until three weeks before U.S. Election day that BTC began its rally from $600 and finally doubling its price by the first week of January.”
“Similarly, in 2020, BTC was stuck in a boring range for half a year and only started rallying from $11K just three weeks before U.S. Election day, reaching a high of $42K by January,” they added.
“Today’s rally has definitely given the market a glimmer of hope just as Uptober optimism was fading,” the traders said, referring to October’s historically bullish seasonality.
October has only twice ended in the red since 2013 – chalking gains of as high as 60% and an average of 22% to make it the best for investor returns. However, prices have largely remained stable in the past two weeks, denting investor hopes.
The bitcoin price was around $63,330 on Sept. 30, so the largest cryptocurrency is up just a touch on a month-to-date basis.
A CoinDesk analysis has shown that most gains in October tend to come in the second half of the month – with price jumps as high as 16% generally appearing after Oct. 15.

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Shaurya is the Deputy Managing Editor for the Data & Tokens team, focusing on decentralized finance, markets, on-chain data, and governance across all major and minor blockchains.