Basic Attention Token volatility and risk: how violent it has been
2,812 daily moves since 4 Mar 2019. On a typical day BAT moves 2.6% in one direction or the other; on 1 day in 20 it has lost more than 8.0%, and its deepest fall from a record close was −97%.
Volatility is the standard deviation of daily log returns multiplied by the square root of 365, the usual way to put it on a yearly scale. “1 in 20” and “1 in 100” are the 5th and 1st percentiles of all daily moves, read straight from the history with no model.
The 10 largest one-day falls, and what followed
| Day | Move | Close | 7 days later | 30 days later |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Mar 2020 | −44.9% | $0.1100 | +24.0% | +46.8% |
| 19 May 2021 | −32.6% | $0.7447 | +19.3% | −18.0% |
| 10 Oct 2025 | −22.5% | $0.1339 | +41.4% | +58.0% |
| 3 Sep 2020 | −20.8% | $0.2508 | +5.9% | −12.1% |
| 31 Oct 2021 | −19.9% | $0.9943 | +0.4% | +46.6% |
| 11 May 2022 | −19.5% | $0.3754 | −0.7% | −3.0% |
| 9 May 2022 | −19.4% | $0.4406 | −10.7% | −10.4% |
| 9 Dec 2024 | −18.9% | $0.2755 | +0.7% | −10.5% |
| 7 Sep 2021 | −18.6% | $0.7777 | +0.5% | −5.7% |
| 23 May 2021 | −18.0% | $0.5576 | +26.2% | −13.3% |
After these 10 falls, BAT was higher a week later in 8 of 10 cases and higher 30 days later in 3 of 10. 10 hand-picked extremes are an anecdote, not a test. The full count is on the 10% drop in a day study: 56 scored cases, verdict “some evidence”.
The 10 largest one-day gains, and what followed
| Day | Move | Close | 7 days later | 30 days later |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 Oct 2021 | +45.6% | $1.24 | −18.6% | +30.0% |
| 16 Mar 2021 | +35.5% | $1.03 | +2.1% | +47.5% |
| 11 Feb 2021 | +33.2% | $0.5912 | +7.5% | +37.8% |
| 27 Nov 2021 | +32.2% | $1.77 | −36.3% | −21.8% |
| 9 Oct 2026 | +31.7% | $0.1353 | +45.5% | −12.9% |
| 24 May 2021 | +30.2% | $0.7258 | +5.8% | −24.1% |
| 10 May 2019 | +29.3% | $0.3637 | +2.1% | −12.6% |
| 22 Jan 2021 | +28.8% | $0.3139 | −1.5% | +93.2% |
| 13 Oct 2026 | +28.5% | $0.1976 | −1.6% | −37.7% |
| 8 Nov 2021 | +27.9% | $1.28 | −10.3% | +2.0% |
After these 10 gains, BAT was higher a week later in 5 of 10 cases and higher 30 days later in 5 of 10. The full count is on the 10% jump in a day study: 58 scored cases, verdict “weak evidence”.
Moves are from one daily close to the next (00:00 UTC), Binance spot. “Open” means that many days have not passed yet.
Basic Attention Token and Bitcoin
Over the last 365 days BAT has moved loosely with Bitcoin: the correlation of their daily moves is 0.53, where 1 means in step and 0 means unrelated. For each 1% Bitcoin moved in a day, BAT moved about 1.23% on average.
| Period | Days | Correlation | Move per 1% of Bitcoin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Last 90 days | 90 | 0.49 | 1.60% |
| Last 365 days | 365 | 0.53 | 1.23% |
| All shared history | 2,812 | 0.60 | 1.03% |
Daily close-to-close moves on the 2,812 days both pairs traded. What BAT did in the week after a Bitcoin shock is tested separately: after Bitcoin drops 5% in a day.