The % price change for every calendar year since 2011 — first available daily close to last.
For each calendar year, this page takes the first available daily close and the last available daily close of that year and expresses the change between them as a percentage. That is the whole calculation — no smoothing, no adjustment, the same daily price history that powers every chart on the main dashboard.
A year only appears once its data genuinely spans it — at least 300 days between the first and last close on record — so a source that only picked up mid-year can't print a six-week move as a fake "annual" return. The current year is the one exception: it always shows, marked YTD, since it isn't finished yet and by definition can't meet that bar.
Early years dwarf recent ones in percentage terms, and that is arithmetic, not a claim about which year was more significant. A move from $13 to $760 and a move from $40,000 to $94,000 can both happen in a year; the first prints as +5,500%, the second as +135%, even though the second is the larger dollar move by far. Percentage returns compress everything to the same starting point of 100, which is useful for comparing years against each other but not for judging which move actually mattered more to a holder's balance.
A calendar-year return says nothing about the path price took to get there. 2013 and 2021 were both positive years with entirely different shapes — one a single sustained run, the other two separate peaks with a deep correction between them. The Rainbow Chart and Halving Countdown pages give more of that in-year context; this page answers one narrow question — up or down, and by how much, January to December.
Related: Monthly Seasonality — the same idea broken down by calendar month instead of by year. Read more: the four-year cycle and every bear market measured.