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Key Takeaways
- The proposed Nicholas Bitcoin and Treasuries AfterDark ETF aims to bottle the overnight performance of the cryptocurrency in an investment vehicle.
- Some research supports the premise of the strategy, but it may not consistently deliver excess returns.
The early bird may get the worm. But does the night owl eat its lunch?
That question is at the core of a proposed exchange-traded fund from Nicholas Wealth called Bitcoin and Treasuries AfterDark. (Approval and launch under the ticker “NGHT” are expected next year.) The strategy aims to capture the performance of the world’s largest cryptocurrency while U.S. stock markets are closed, on the belief that bitcoin’s (BTCUSD) performance is better in the evenings.
“In a market like we’re in now, a lot of the losses have [been] overnight,” David Nicholas, president and founder of Nicholas Wealth, told Investopedia. “But in a bull market for bitcoin—that’s actually when we see the biggest outperformance.”
For investors who have been unhappy with the coin’s not-so-hot returns lately, an actively managed strategy could be appealing, and there is some research that suggests bitcoin’s overnight performance can exceed the day’s. But other numbers suggest that the strategy isn’t a slam dunk.
WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU
There’s a joke in the ETF world that the arrival of a new strategy is a lagging indicator—meaning that by the time a particular investment approach is identified, and packaged for mass-market consumption, it’s over or in the final stages of delivering any alpha.
One study that analyzed five-minute bitcoin price data from January 2018 to December 2023 found that average overnight returns were 0.093%, better than U.S. trading hour returns of -0.029%. (Crypto markets trade 24/7, with investors across geographies mostly trading during their waking hours.)
If bitcoin gains are bigger in the U.S.’s off hours, that would indicate meaningfully higher buying activity overseas. That hasn’t been the case for most of the past year—suggesting that such a strategy may be unable to deliver excess returns consistently over long periods of time. Other ETFs in the same vein—those that aimed to deliver nighttime performance of stocks—closed roughly a year after launching, in large part because the strategy underperformed.
“If I just want to have Asia-hour exposure, that’s cool,” Greg Magadini, Director of Derivatives at Amberdata, said about the strategy. “But there shouldn’t be any reason for it to outperform or underperform consistently. It’s kind of just noise.”
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Paris-based blockchain analytics company Kaiko’s data show that U.S. bitcoin trading session returns exceeded both APAC’s and London’s from January 2023 to December 2025. Trading volumes over the same time period, meanwhile, don’t indicate that one region is steering the direction of bitcoin, though the U.S.’s share has touched historical highs in the past year, Kaiko research analyst Laurens Fraussen told Investopedia.
Still, Fraussen said, “there is no structural regime shift in which one region suddenly dominates global [bitcoin] trading volume.”