Bitcoin (BTC) Trails All Major Assets With 7.3% YTD Loss in Bilello's 2026 Ranking

2026's Worst Major Assets

Bitcoin (BTC) and gold have landed together at the bottom of 2026's major asset table, and the strategist whose data produced the ranking says the pairing is without precedent in his record. Figures compiled by Charlie Bilello, chief market strategist at Creative Planning and a long-running cross-asset scorekeeper, show gold down 7.50% since the start of January and Bitcoin down 7.30%. Both trail stocks, bonds and even cash, a striking result for the two investments investors conventionally reach for when economic uncertainty rises. Bilello's comparison, which ranks the main asset classes against each other every year, has never before shown Bitcoin and gold occupying the last two places at the same time, making 2026 a first in his dataset. Neither asset has managed a positive year-to-date return, which cuts against their reputation as reliable hedges during turbulent markets. The damage is real but contained: a 7.30% drawdown in Bitcoin stays well short of the roughly 20% decline that market convention uses to define a bear market. Still, the store-of-value argument at the core of Bitcoin maximalism has taken a visible knock, because the asset has spent ten months failing to outperform instruments that carry no volatility at all. The Bitcoin price itself sits near $80,492 on Sunday, essentially flat over the past 24 hours, so the ranking reflects an accumulation of small losses rather than a fresh break lower. Bilello's table spans the major liquid asset classes, so the bottom two places mean the two underperformed everything from equities to cash equivalents. More than two months of trading remain before the year closes, and the strategist's own framing leaves the final 2026 standings open. Whether either asset can recover enough ground to climb off the bottom of the table is the question that will decide how the year is scored.

Two Years, Two Reversals

The long-term record still separates this year's result from the structural story. Bilello's figures put Bitcoin's annualized return since 2011 at roughly 120.6%, against 6.3% for gold across the same stretch, which keeps the asset the strongest long-term performer among the classes his comparison tracks. Recent years show how quickly that leadership rotates. Bitcoin (BTC) ended 2024 as the best-performing major asset class with a 121% gain, a result that dwarfed every traditional alternative. Gold then seized the crown in 2025, surging 63.7% and outpacing the rest of the table. In 2026 the two have swung from the top of the standings to the bottom, an effective two-year reversal of roles at both ends of the same list. For long-term HODLers the message embedded in the numbers is straightforward: a single calendar year says little about decade-scale returns, and yearly leadership has flipped between the two assets three times running. The structural case has also broadened since 2011. Spot ETFs now give institutional balance sheets direct exposure to Bitcoin, a distribution channel that did not exist in earlier cycles, and regulated access has widened the buyer base well beyond the retail cohort that drove past rallies. That widening has not prevented this year's negative return, and it has not stopped gold and Bitcoin (BTC) from falling together, an outcome that challenges the assumption the two hedge the same risks in a portfolio. Bilello's own reading of the table, per his published figures, is that market leadership can change in a short span even for assets with outstanding historical returns. With more than two months left before the end of the year, the last word on the 2026 ranking has not been written.

Our own composite scoring keeps the story range-bound rather than broken: the live tape shows Bitcoin at $80,492, flat over the past 24 hours, with the trend reading sideways and the Fear & Greed Index at 54, neutral. Resistance at $82,418 scores 96 out of 100 on that composite, while support at $78,535 carries a 98, the strongest level on the board. Perpetual funding runs at a near-neutral 0.0058%, and the long/short account ratio sits at 2.26, so derivative positioning leans long without crowding. As our Bitcoin coverage has tracked, a weekly close below $83,000 keeps Benjamin Cowen's fake breakout scenario in play, Peter Schiff's $75,000 warning activates on a break of $80,000, and Ted Pillows maps a $74,000–$75,000 bottom before any reversal. The full set of levels sits in our Bitcoin technical analysis.