Bitcoin Isn't Just More Volatile Than the IHSG. Here's the Actual Multiple
5 min read
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5 min read
Bitcoin fell about 38% in three weeks in early 2026. The IHSG, Indonesia's main stock index, took roughly six months to fall by about the same amount. Both moves are real, dated and sourced below, and the gap between them is a more honest answer to "how much more volatile is Bitcoin" than the usual vague claim that crypto is riskier.
Almost every crypto explainer says Bitcoin's volatility beats the stock market's without saying by how much. Part of the reason is that a clean, tracked volatility number exists for Bitcoin but not for the IHSG. What does exist for both is a real, documented crash in the same year, and the difference in how fast each one happened is the real multiple.
Volatility measures how much an asset's price swings around, not which direction it moves. A stock that jumps 2% up one day and 2% down the next is more volatile than one that creeps up 0.1% a day, even if both end the year at the same price. Analysts usually express it as an "annualized" percentage: roughly how large a typical price swing would be if the recent pace of moves continued for a full year. A Bitcoin volatility reading of 35% means its price has, mathematically, been swinging by around that much on a yearly basis based on its recent daily moves.
Bitcoin has a real, tracked volatility number, and it swings a lot within a single year on its own. Deribit's DVOL index, which prices what options traders currently expect Bitcoin's 30-day volatility to be, sat near 35 in early August 2026, down from a high of 90 earlier the same year, according to CoinDesk's reporting on Kaiko's market research (7 August 2026). That is an implied, forward-looking number, not a measurement of what already happened, but the swing from 90 to 35 within months shows how much Bitcoin's own risk level moves.
Zoom out to realized volatility, what actually happened rather than what is expected, and BlackRock's iShares desk puts Bitcoin's typical annualized volatility today in the 35% to 40% range, well down from peaks above 150% earlier in Bitcoin's history. Even at the low end of that range, it is still a large number to hold in a portfolio.
The IHSG has nothing like Bitcoin's DVOL, and there is no Indonesia-specific version of Wall Street's VIX "fear index" either. Searching for one only turns up explainers of the US VIX, not a real published IHSG figure. Rather than force a comparison between two differently defined numbers, here is what each index actually did during its worst stretch of 2026, fully dated and sourced.
Bitcoin hit $97,860 in mid-January 2026, then dropped below $61,000 by 5 February, a fall of about 38% in roughly three weeks, driven by a rapid unwind of leveraged positions across the market (CNBC, 5 February 2026). It fell to similar lows again in June, and was trading around $63,260 by 17 August 2026, sitting nearly half below its October 2025 record high of $126,198.
The IHSG closed 2025 at 8,646.94 on 30 December, then closed the first half of 2026 at 5,643.19 on 30 June, a fall of about 34.7%, a similar-sized move to Bitcoin's, but spread across roughly six months instead of three weeks (Kompas, 30 June 2026; Databoks). By mid-August 2026 it had recovered to around the 6,300 level.
| Peak | Trough | Decline | Time taken | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | $97,860 (mid-Jan 2026) | ~$61,000 (5 Feb 2026) | ~38% | ~3 weeks |
| IHSG | 8,646.94 (30 Dec 2025) | 5,643.19 (30 Jun 2026) | ~34.7% | ~6 months |
Both indexes lost a similar share of their value in 2026. Bitcoin did it in roughly an eighth of the time, about eight times faster. That speed, not just the eventual size of the move, is what an investor actually feels: the IHSG gave holders months to notice the trend and react, Bitcoin gave holders about three weeks.
A faster-moving asset needs a smaller position size to carry the same amount of real risk, simply because there is less time to react once it starts moving against you. It is also worth checking more often than a slower-moving stock position, not because it is a worse asset, but because a loss of the same size can arrive in a fraction of the time. The math on the way back up is not symmetric either: a 38% loss like Bitcoin's early-2026 drop does not need a 38% gain to break even, it needs closer to 61%, the same asymmetry covered in how the math behind recovering from a loss actually works.
Before sizing any Bitcoin position, check its own price history on its NetWort Asset Detail page, where the swings are visible directly rather than summarized into one averaged number.