Bitcoin's Sharpe Ratio slides to lowest since 2022.

Bitcoin BTC $ 62,860.93 has dropped by 28% so far this year, a brutal slide that looks even worse through the lens of the Sharpe Ratio, a metric professional investors use to determine what slice of their portfolio should be allocated to a specific asset.

The Sharpe Ratio is the gold standard for measuring risk-adjusted returns and was developed by Nobel Prize-winning economist William F. Sharpe.

Bitcoin's 365-day rolling Sharpe Ratio plummeted to -21 at the end of June, the lowest since late 2022, according to data source CryptoQuant. It was recently hovering just short of -20.

This deeply negative reading indicates that a bitcoin investor over the period took on extra market volatility while generating a return far worse than they could have earned on a risk-free investment, such as the 10-year U.S. Treasury note. The benchmark bond recently offered a yield of around 4.45%.

BTC's Sharpe Ratio slides to nearly -20. (CryptoQuant, Joao Wedson)

The Sharpe Ratio is calculated by subtracting the risk-free rate from the asset's total return over a specific period, then dividing the result by the asset's standard deviation (a measure of price volatility). A positive ratio means investors are being rewarded for taking the volatility risk. A negative ratio suggests they are being punished.