Do moon phases affect bitcoin’s price?
No. Being long bitcoin in the half of the lunar month around the new moon and short around the full moon — the rule behind the “lunar effect” in stocks — produced a Sharpe ratio of −0.04 on bitcoin and −0.14 on ether from August 2017 to September 2026. The new-moon half returned slightly less than the full-moon half, the opposite of the claim.
The claim
Yuan, Zheng and Zhu studied 48 stock markets and found returns on days around the full moon lower than on days around the new moon, by 3–5% a year, and attributed it to mood. The QuantConnect Strategy Library turns the finding into a rule: go long seven days before the new moon and switch to short seven days before the full moon. Crypto looks like a natural candidate — it trades every day and retail participation is high.
What we tested
BTC and ETH spot, daily closes, August 2017 to September 2026. Moon phases were computed astronomically, to within minutes of the published times. The position was long from the last quarter to the first quarter (the window around the new moon) and short from the first quarter to the last quarter (around the full moon). We compared the result with the same positions laid over a calendar shifted at random, which keeps the market’s trend and the rule’s exposure but breaks any link to the moon.
Result
The lunar rule earned nothing. Its Sharpe ratio was −0.04 on bitcoin and −0.14 on ether, well inside the range of the shifted placebos. The new-moon half did 0.02% a day worse than the full-moon half on bitcoin and 0.07% worse on ether. By era the rule was flat in 2017–2019, mildly positive in 2020–2023 and clearly negative after the spot ETF launch. The test was sensitive enough to detect an effect worth roughly half a Sharpe point.
Lunar rule (long around the new moon, short around the full moon), Sharpe ratio
| Period | BTC | ETH |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 2017 – Sep 2026 | −0.04 | −0.14 |
| 2017–2019 | ≈ 0 | ≈ 0 |
| 2020–2023 | +0.43 | +0.18 |
| 2024–2026 (spot ETF era) | −1.16 | −0.93 |
| New-moon half minus full-moon half, per day | −0.02% | −0.07% |
What it means
Whatever the moon does to mood, it does not show up in crypto returns at a size that matters. Calendar rules with a story attached are easy to find in a short sample and hard to keep: the positive stretch of 2020–2023 reversed over the next three years.
What would change the verdict
A lunar effect smaller than the test can see is not ruled out, but it would be too small to trade after costs. We would revisit it only if a rule fixed today, run on new data, showed the sign reported for stocks.
This note re-tests a claim made by the cited authors on our own crypto market data; the summary of their method is ours. Tested · published · last reviewed . Research, not investment advice.