Crypto alert threshold calculator
Over the last 365 days, Bitcoin moved a median of 1.25% per day, and 5% of days exceeded 4.51%. A 5% alert would have fired about 1.2 times a month — rare enough to still be worth reading.
How often each threshold fires for BTC
| Alert threshold | Times per month | Times per year | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2% | 8.4 | 102 | Too noisy |
| 3% | 3.8 | 46 | Good balance |
| 5% | 1.2 | 15 | Good balance |
| 8% | 0.2 | 2 | Rare — big moves only |
| 10% | 0.2 | 2 | Rare — big moves only |
| 15% | 0 | 0 | Never fired |
| 20% | 0 | 0 | Never fired |
| 25% | 0 | 0 | Never fired |
| 30% | 0 | 0 | Never fired |
Based on 365 daily closes from Binance. A “firing” is any day whose close-to-close move exceeded the threshold, which is exactly what a 24-hour percentage alert measures.
What BTC’s daily movement actually looks like
| Median day | 1.25% | Half of all days moved less than this |
| Busy day (top 25%) | 2.24% | Roughly once every four days |
| Volatile day (top 10%) | 3.58% | About three times a month |
| Extreme day (top 5%) | 4.51% | About once or twice a month |
| Largest single day | 14.02% | In the period measured |
How to read this
The mistake almost everyone makes is setting a threshold inside the asset’s normal daily range. If your alert sits below the median, it fires most days, you stop reading it, and the one that mattered gets dismissed with the rest.
So work backwards from how often you want to hear from it. Two or three alerts a month per asset is the sweet spot for most people: frequent enough to catch real events, rare enough that you still open the notification. Find that row in the table above and use that percentage.
Two caveats worth stating plainly. This measures close-to-close daily moves, so an asset that swung hard intraday and closed flat does not appear here — intraday alerts fire more often than this table suggests. And past volatility is a guide, not a promise: a quiet year does not mean the next one is quiet.
Never miss a move in Bitcoin
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