Natural Gas Moved 4.5% a Day Over the Past Year — Bitcoin Just 3.4%

Natural gas moved 4.5% on a normal day over the past year. Bitcoin moved 3.4%. The counterintuitive result comes from SignalPilotLabs, a TradingView analyst, who measured daily ranges across eight markets from 16 October 2025 to 15 October 2026 and found that natural gas, silver and WTI oil all swung wider than Bitcoin.

How the measurement worked

The study used TradingView daily candles for eight markets: gold, silver, WTI oil, natural gas, EUR/USD, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100 and Bitcoin. For each day, SignalPilotLabs measured the high minus the low, as a share of the open. The "normal day" is the median — the middle value when every day of the year is lined up by size.

One adjustment mattered. Bitcoin trades every day while the other seven trade only on weekdays. So the comparison uses Bitcoin's Monday-to-Friday candles. Counting weekends, Bitcoin's normal day shrinks to 3.0%.

What the numbers show

The full ranking of normal daily ranges:

• Natural gas: 4.5%
• Silver: 4.4%
• WTI oil: 4.2%
• Bitcoin: 3.4% on weekdays (3.0% including weekends)
• Gold: 2.2%
• Nasdaq 100: 1.2%
• S&P 500: 0.9%
• EUR/USD: 0.5%

Measured against the S&P 500's 0.9% day, a normal day in natural gas was 5.2 times as wide. Silver ran 5.1 times, oil 4.8 times and Bitcoin 4.0 times.

The gap shows up most clearly in frequency. Natural gas moved more than 2% on 250 of its 251 trading days. The S&P 500 did that on just 8 days.

Did the order hold all year?

No. The study split the year into two halves at 15 April, and the ranking shifted underneath.

Gas and silver out-moved Bitcoin in both halves. Oil did not. In the first half, oil's normal day was 3.2% against Bitcoin's 3.9%. In the second half the positions flipped: oil widened to 4.8% while Bitcoin compressed to 2.9%.

A year earlier the order was different again. Then silver's normal day was 2.2% and oil's 2.5%, both below Bitcoin, whose own daily range barely changed between the two periods.

What were the biggest single days?

The extremes dwarf the medians. Oil's biggest day came on 9 March 2026, when it traded across a 39.1% range and closed 13.2% lower. Silver's top day was 38.6% on 30 January. Natural gas reached 32.4% on the 21st of that month. Bitcoin's widest day was 18.7%, on 6 February — less than half oil's peak range.

What does the chart actually display?

The attached chart shows natural gas, daily, from 21 January to 15 October 2026 — the market with the widest normal day, selected by a rule the analyst set before measuring. The biggest day, 21 January, is the first candle. Every day that moved at least twice its normal day is shaded.

Because the chart is a continuous futures series (NG1!), the marks along the bottom are contract switches. A gap there is a switch, not a price move, and no day's measured range includes one.

What the study does not tell you

SignalPilotLabs is explicit about the limits. The work describes one year. The analysts did not test the results against chance, and the data says nothing about how far any market moves next. Daily ranges include wicks, not just closing moves. All of it is past data. The piece is labeled, in the author's words, "Observations, not recommendations."

For traders and asset allocators, the takeaway is narrow but useful: over this particular year, the stereotype of Bitcoin as the wildest major asset on the board did not survive contact with the energy and metals markets, and oil's second-half surge shows these rankings can reorder within months.