Analysis

The performance of major cryptocurrencies over the past month was mostly bad – only 6 out of the 50 cryptocurrencies that we examined are up from their values 30 days ago. Bitcoin (BTC), the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is currently trading slightly above $11000 at the time of writing, and traded between $9500 and $13000 last month. BTC has made steady gains over the past six consecutive days.

Outside of cryptocurrencies, the S&P 500 is down 1.95% from 30 days ago and closed last Friday at $2932.05.

Figure 1 presents the risk versus return trade-off over the past 30 days by plotting mean daily return versus historical daily volatility for various cryptocurrencies.

Figure 1. Plot of mean daily return against historical daily volatility for individual cryptocurrencies from July 7, 2019 to August 4, 2019. Higher returns at a given level of risk, measured through historical daily volatility, indicates a better investment.