Does timing matter for recurring bitcoin buys?

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6 January 2026

Recurring bitcoin purchases, often referred to as dollar-cost averaging, are a popular investment strategy because they remove the stress of timing the market. Many River clients happily follow this “set it and forget it” strategy, and also benefit from zero fees on their recurring buys.

While one of the big appeals of recurring buys is not bothering to time the market, it is still interesting to observe if ETFs and other derivatives have an impact on bitcoin’s price patterns that you could use to your advantage if you wish to.

So does the timing of a recurring buy matter? Are there certain times of day or days of the week when you consistently get more bitcoin for your dollar? To find out, we dug into bitcoin’s historical price data.

The best time to regularly buy bitcoin

We backtested daily and weekly recurring buy strategies since January 2023, evaluating execution times in one-hour increments. For daily recurring buys, we tested 24 strategies, one for each hour of the day. For weekly recurring buys, we tested 168 strategies, covering every combination of day of the week and hour of the day (7 × 24 = 168).

For daily recurring buys, timing does not have a meaningful impact on the average price paid to buy bitcoin. Of the 24 strategies tested, there was only a 0.08% difference between the best (11 AM EST) and worst (7 PM EST) hours of the day to have a recurring buy.

For weekly recurring buys, timing appears to have a real yet modest effect. Of the 168 possible hours of the week to have a recurring order, there is a 0.77% difference between the best time (Friday at 3 AM EST) and worst time (Wednesday at 9 PM EST) to have a recurring buy.

In other words, a $100 weekly recurring buy from January 2023 through October 2025 would have resulted in $253 more bitcoin acquired at the best time compared to the worst.

Why might this be the case?

Early Friday mornings fall during a quieter part of the global trading week. U.S. markets are closed, Europe hasn’t fully opened, and many traders are reducing risk ahead of the weekend rather than adding new positions. While Bitcoin operates 24/7, Bitcoin ETFs can only be traded during business hours. The combination of these factors can lead to softer prices and fewer aggressive buyers, which helps explain why recurring buys placed at this time have, on average, been a bit cheaper.

Wednesday nights, on the other hand, line up with the start of the Asian trading day and a more active part of the week. New liquidity is entering the market, traders are more willing to add exposure, and prices are often pushed slightly higher as a result.

Weekends typically being a bit lower on average also makes sense. Since most assets can’t be traded during weekends, bitcoin is often the first to react to geopolitical events that cause unrest among investors.

Of course, there is no guarantee that Friday mornings will continue to be the best time to buy. And a 0.34% cost advantage won’t meaningfully change long-term outcomes on its own. Still, it may be a useful consideration the next time you set up a weekly recurring purchase.

Sooner, rather than later, may be the best time to buy bitcoin

As we all know, bitcoin is one of the best-performing assets of this century. Over the time period of our analysis, bitcoin’s price increased by more than 800%, or roughly 1.6% per week on average as shown in the chart below.

An important caveat to this analysis is that prices were normalized to account for this steady weekly appreciation. Without this normalization, the results would be trivial: the best time to place a weekly recurring buy would be at the beginning of the week, and the worst would be at the end.

What should I do with this information?

If you are a passive bitcoin investor, there’s no need to stress over the exact timing of your recurring buy. What matters far more is choosing an investment strategy that fits your lifestyle and risk tolerance, and that you are buying bitcoin in the first place ahead of roughly 8 billion people who haven’t yet.

With that said, if you’re interested in fine-tuning the details to capture small advantages based on bitcoin’s historical performance, here are a few takeaways for optimizing the timing of a weekly recurring investment: