Saylor's bitcoin numbers checked: 38% a year holds up, the 200-week average premium is 24%, not 25%

Michael Saylor, the chairman of Strategy, told a television interviewer this week that bitcoin is "at the beginning of a bull market," and backed it with three numbers: that bitcoin has risen about 38% a year since Strategy bought its first coins in August 2020, that it recently bounced from slightly below its 200-week moving average and now sits about 25% above it, and that the low was slightly below $60,000. Clips of the interview are circulating widely. We did not take the numbers on trust. We recomputed them from exchange data.

Claim 1: up about 38% a year since August 2020

Binance.US recorded a BTC/USDT daily close of $11,392 on August 11, 2020. The most recent daily close we pulled, October 13, 2026, was $82,825. Over about 6.17 years that is a compound annual growth rate of roughly 38%. The claim checks out.

What the number leaves out is the starting point. August 2020 was before the 2021 rally, and the same arithmetic run from the October 2025 peak gives a negative result. The highest daily close in our 400-day window was $124,798 on October 5, 2025. Bitcoin is now about 34% below that.

Claim 2: bounced below the 200-week average, now about 25% above

We averaged the last 200 weekly closes on Binance.US. That average is about $66,850. Bitcoin's latest weekly close, $82,825, is 23.9% above it. Saylor's "25%" is a fair rounding of that figure, though it is a little high.

The "slightly below" part also holds. In the week of August 9, 2026, the weekly close of $62,889 was 1.7% below the then-average of $64,001. The next weekly close, August 16, was $77,727, which was 20.9% above the average. That is a jump of about 24% in a week, and the data shows nothing in between.

Claim 3: the bottom was slightly below $60,000

The lowest daily close in our window was $58,633 on June 29, 2026. That is a little under $60,000, so this checks out as well. Bitcoin is about 41% above that close today.

What the numbers do not tell you

All three figures are accurate, and none of them is a forecast. A 24% premium to the 200-week average means bitcoin is no longer near the level that has acted as long-term support in past cycles; it also means the cheap entry the average marked in June and August is behind us. The "bull market" label is Saylor's reading. Whether prices keep rising is not something the data can say.

Two other items in the interview were forward-looking, and we could not verify them: the idea that banks will lend against bitcoin on a scale that moves the price, and that long-term returns will average 20% to 30% a year. Those are projections by the head of a company that owns 848,250 bitcoin, as our coverage of its latest filing showed. Weigh them accordingly.

See live prices on our crypto prices page.

Sources: Binance.US BTCUSDT daily and weekly candles, retrieved October 14, 2026; Coinbase Exchange BTC-USD statistics. Calculations are ours; exchange closing prices differ slightly by venue. Information, not investment advice.