If I bought Bitcoin every day for a year, where would I stand today?

This is the question people actually ask, and it usually gets answered with a story instead of a number. So here is the number, computed from the same 5pm daily price series that runs the Bitcoin fund dashboard — updated every business day.

Pick an amount, a period, and whether you are buying Bitcoin directly or the fund that holds it.

How this is worked out

Every business day, a fixed ringgit amount buys however much Bitcoin that amount gets at the 5pm Malaysia time price — Bitcoin in dollars at 09:00 UTC, converted at that day's 5pm interbank USD/MYR rate. Both legs are timestamped to the same moment, which matters more than it sounds; using a same-day price with a stale exchange rate quietly corrupts the whole calculation.

Your average cost is total ringgit spent divided by total Bitcoin held. Your unrealised gain or loss is what that Bitcoin is worth at the latest price, minus what you paid. Nothing is sold, so nothing is realised — this is a paper position, and paper positions move every day.

The thing most people get wrong about the average

Look at the two rows in the calculator: your average cost and the average of the daily prices. They are not the same number, and yours is always the lower one.

That is not luck and it is not a trick of the market. When you spend a fixed amount rather than buying a fixed quantity, a low price automatically buys more units and a high price automatically buys fewer. Your holdings end up weighted towards the cheap days without you doing anything clever. Over the past year that gap has been in the region of 5% — free, structural, and available to anyone who can set up a standing instruction.

This is the entire mathematical case for buying on a schedule. It is real, it is reliable, and it is smaller than most people think. It is a discount on your average entry price — not a guarantee about your outcome.

What it does not do

Here is where most writing on this topic stops being honest.

Buying every day does not stop you losing money. If the price today is below your average cost, you are down — and if the price has fallen steadily since you started, you will be down no matter how disciplined you were. Run the calculator over the past year and you can see this for yourself rather than taking anyone's word for it.

What it does do is change how much the timing of your entry matters. Compare the last two rows: your daily-buying result against putting the same total in on day one. When the price has fallen since you started, spreading the purchases out will have lost you materially less, because most of your money went in at lower prices than the first day's. In a rising market the comparison flips — day-one lump sum wins, and buying gradually costs you the rise you sat out.

So the fair summary is:

• Buying on a schedule reduces the consequence of picking a bad start date.
• It does not improve expected return, and in a rising market it usually lags a lump sum.
• It does not protect against a falling asset. Nothing that involves holding the asset does.

Anyone who sells you the first point while hiding the third is selling you something.

Bitcoin directly, or the fund?

Toggle between them. The two lines track each other closely — that is the point of the fund, and the tracking analysis sets out how closely — with the fund running slightly behind over long windows because its management fee accrues daily out of NAV.

What the toggle cannot show you are the differences that are not in the price: how each is custodied, what happens if you die holding it, which one your accountant and your regulator recognise, what you can and cannot do with it at 2am on a Sunday, and what sales charge (if any) applies on the way in. Those are usually the deciding factors, and none of them appear in a return figure.

Reading your own result honestly

Three things worth sitting with before you draw a conclusion:

1. The window is short and it is one window. A single year of a volatile asset tells you about that year. Change the period and the answer changes — sometimes completely. That instability is the finding.
2. A paper loss is a real loss if you need the money. "Unrealised" describes the accounting, not your circumstances. If you would be forced to sell into a drawdown, the loss is as real as any other.
3. The maths above works identically on the way down. Buying more units as the price falls is only an advantage if the price eventually recovers. If it does not, a schedule simply bought you a larger position in something that kept falling.

If you want to do this

Two practical notes. First, the calculator excludes trading fees, spreads and any sales charge — on daily purchases those add up, and a platform charging a flat fee per trade will punish small daily buys badly. Weekly or monthly buying captures nearly all of the averaging benefit at a fraction of the transaction cost. Second, size it against money you can genuinely leave alone, because everything above depends on not being forced to sell.

The Invest page covers both routes — the regulated funds and self-managed exchange accounts — and the fund dashboards show the underlying data this calculator runs on.