Who prices whom over the weekend

The Weekend Mirage

From Friday's close to Monday's open, COIN, MSTR and IBIT cannot trade — but Bitcoin never stops. Their Monday gap is a delayed reaction to a move everyone already watched. This page measures how much of the gap the weekend Bitcoin move actually explains, and whether big weekend moves produce gaps that fade by Monday's close.

Updated 19 September 2026 · 04:23 UTC

Of the three, IBIT's Monday gap tracks the weekend Bitcoin move most closely (R² 0.99); COIN tracks it least (R² 0.73). Whatever R² remains is the part of the gap that is mirage — weekend sentiment, positioning and guesswork repriced at the open.

Every weekend, plotted

One dot per weekend: how far Bitcoin moved while the stock market was dark (horizontal) against the Monday opening gap (vertical). The dashed lines are the per-ticker regressions. Sample: 98 weekends, 2024-09-27 → 2026-09-11.

COINMSTRIBIT

Dots hugging a line mean the gap is mostly information. Scatter around it is the mirage: weekend emotion, thin-price anchoring and positioning repriced at Monday's open. The steeper the line, the harder the stock leans on Bitcoin's weekend tape.

The regression, per ticker

Monday opening gap regressed on the weekend Bitcoin move. Beta reads as gap-percent per weekend-percent; R² is the share of the gap the weekend explains. Intercept is the average gap when Bitcoin went nowhere.

Ticker	Weekends	Gap beta	R²	Flat-weekend gap
COIN	98	0.89×	0.73	+0.1%
MSTR	98	1.14×	0.81	+0.1%
IBITtrading since January 2024 — smallest sample	98	0.99×	0.99	-0.0%

Charlie's readTwo jargon terms, translated. 'Gap beta' is how many percent the stock gaps for each 1% Bitcoin moved over the weekend — IBIT's 0.99× means a +2% weekend typically became about a +2.0% Monday gap. 'R²' is the share of the gap the weekend move explains, from 0 (none) to 1 (all). Even for IBIT, the best-tracked of the three, roughly 1% of the typical gap is something else — weekend emotion, thin-price anchoring, guesswork. That residue is the mirage.

Do big gaps fade?

On weekends when Bitcoin moved 3% or more, did the Monday gap overstate? "Rest of Monday" is the average move from open to close on those days; "faded" is how often the day's direction opposed the gap. This is a description of past gaps, not a strategy.

Ticker	Weekend condition	Cases	Average gap	Average rest of Monday	Gap faded
COIN	BTC weekend ≥ +3%	12	+4.2%	+0.7%	25%
COIN	BTC weekend ≤ −3%	9	-4.8%	-0.7%	33%
MSTR	BTC weekend ≥ +3%	12	+5.3%	+1.2%	33%
MSTR	BTC weekend ≤ −3%	9	-6.1%	+1.2%	56%
IBIT	BTC weekend ≥ +3%	12	+4.7%	+0.1%	42%
IBIT	BTC weekend ≤ −3%	9	-5.4%	+0.4%	44%

Charlie's readAfter weekends of +3% or more, the gap faded intraday 33% of the time (average rest-of-Monday +0.7%); after weekends of −3% or worse, the gap bounced back 44% of the time (average rest-of-Monday +0.3%). Big gaps overstating the weekend is the mirage in action — but this is an average over past Mondays, and any single Monday can run violently. A description, not a strategy.

The ten loudest weekends

The largest weekend Bitcoin moves in the sample and the gaps they produced. Holiday-Monday cases open on Tuesday.

Friday → next session	Weekend BTC	COIN gap	MSTR gap	IBIT gap
2025-02-28 → 2025-03-03	+11.2%	+7.7%	+14.8%	+10.6%
2025-04-04 → 2025-04-07	-8.0%	-9.0%	-11.4%	-8.4%
2025-01-31 → 2025-02-03	-6.9%	-6.3%	-7.4%	-6.5%
2026-01-30 → 2026-02-02	-6.7%	-2.5%	-6.6%	-6.8%
2024-11-08 → 2024-11-11	+6.7%	+10.9%	+9.8%	+6.8%
2026-06-05 → 2026-06-08	+5.9%	+2.8%	+4.5%	+5.4%
2025-11-28 → 2025-12-01	-5.8%	-4.5%	-5.0%	-5.1%
2026-01-16 → 2026-01-20	-4.8%	-3.5%	-4.9%	-5.0%
2026-06-12 → 2026-06-15	+4.7%	+6.4%	+7.5%	+5.0%
2025-03-07 → 2025-03-10	-4.4%	-5.7%	-6.7%	-4.9%

The most recent weekend

Bitcoin moved +0.5% between the Friday 2026-09-11 close and the Monday 2026-09-14 open (nearest hourly prints). The regression said to expect the gaps below; the actual column is what opened.

Ticker	Gap the weekend implied	Actual Monday gap	Rest of Monday
COIN	+0.6%	+3.2%	+5.9%
MSTR	+0.7%	-0.1%	+4.6%
IBIT	+0.5%	+0.7%	+1.5%

The bottom line

What it all says tonight

Over 98 weekends since 2024-09-27, the Monday gap in crypto-adjacent stocks is mostly — but never fully — the weekend Bitcoin move arriving late. IBIT is the most weekend-driven of the three (R² 0.99), COIN the least (R² 0.73). The most recent weekend saw Bitcoin move +0.5% into the Monday 2026-09-14 open. What to watch next: the next weekend where Bitcoin moves 3% or more — the fade table says how those gaps have behaved. What would prove the mirage thesis wrong: gaps that stop tracking the weekend at all (R² collapsing toward zero), which would mean these stocks have decoupled from the asset they exist to mirror.

Method, scope and what would make this wrong

What is measured. For every Friday to next-session pair since 2024-09-27, Bitcoin is read at the U.S. market close on Friday and at the U.S. market open on the next session (daylight-saving aware), using the nearest hourly print. The stock gap is the next session's open (Monday, or Tuesday when Monday is a market holiday) against Friday's close. Prices come from Yahoo Finance's public tape; all three stocks and Bitcoin are read from the same provider on the same dates.

Honest edges. IBIT began trading in January 2024, so its sample is the shortest and every row it joins says so. The Bitcoin anchors are the nearest hourly prints — they can differ from the exact closing and opening moments by up to an hour, and one provider's Bitcoin tape is not every venue's. The fade test ignores borrow costs, slippage and the impossibility of trading the open at the open. A gap that fades on average can still run violently on any single Monday.

Missing stays missing. Weekends with no usable hourly Bitcoin print near an anchor are dropped from the sample, not filled. If a price feed fails at export time the affected figure is marked not available below.