Spot Bitcoin ETFs: What the SEC Approved, and the Weekend Gap

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · Published 2026-09-25

For years the only way to hold bitcoin was to buy the coin itself, through a crypto exchange and a wallet. Since January 2024 there is a second route: a fund that holds the coin and trades on a stock exchange. This page covers what regulators approved, what the fund wrapper changes, and one measured cost of that wrapper that most explanations skip.

How it works

The fund buys bitcoin and keeps it with a custodian. It issues shares, and each share stands for a slice of the coins the fund holds. As bitcoin’s price moves, the value of that slice moves with it.

Large firms keep the share price close to the holdings. Authorized participants, usually big trading firms, can create new shares or redeem existing ones with the fund. If the shares trade above the value of the bitcoin behind them, creating and selling shares earns the difference; if below, buying and redeeming does. That trade pulls the price back into line.

Investors buy the shares like any stock. They sit in an ordinary brokerage account next to other ETFs, can be bought with a limit order, and never need a crypto wallet.

The fund charges a yearly fee, taken out of the holdings a little each day. Over time that is why a share tracks slightly behind the coin, and the expense ratio page covers how that drag adds up.

What the SEC approved on 10 Jan 2024

The order is Release No. 34-99306, dated 10 Jan 2024, and this page reads it as published on sec.gov on 25 Sep 2026. It approved, on an accelerated basis, 11 exchange proposals to list bitcoin funds: three on NYSE Arca, two on Nasdaq and six on Cboe BZX.

The list includes the iShares Bitcoin Trust, now traded as IBIT, and the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund, traded as FBTC, along with funds from Grayscale, Bitwise, Hashdex, Valkyrie, ARK 21Shares, Invesco Galaxy, VanEck, WisdomTree and Franklin.

Why it changed its mind. The SEC had turned down earlier requests, and a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., held in 2023 that it had not adequately explained its refusal of Grayscale’s. The order says the agency then ran its own correlation study of spot bitcoin against CME bitcoin futures, using data from 1 Mar 2021 to 20 Oct 2023.

On that basis it found the proposals consistent with the Exchange Act, reasoning that fraud or manipulation moving the spot price would likely show up in the regulated futures market too, where surveillance can catch it. The order says it approves them under the standards of Sections 6(b)(5) and 11A(a)(1)(C)(iii) of the Exchange Act: it is a ruling on the exchanges’ listing rules.

A worked example

Take $10,000 put into IBIT at its first closing price, $26.63 on 11 Jan 2024. That buys 375 whole shares, since 375 times $26.63 is $9,986.25, leaving $13.75 in cash.

At the close on 24 Sep 2026, IBIT was $47.81. The 375 shares were then worth 375 times $47.81, or $17,928.75. On the same dates FBTC went from $40.88 to $73.41, a rise of 79.6%, against 79.5% for IBIT.

Now the gap, from a real weekend. IBIT closed at $35.61 on Friday 2 Aug 2024. Bitcoin kept trading through Saturday and Sunday; on Yahoo’s daily closes, which fall at midnight UTC, it ended Sunday 5.37% below its Friday close. The fund could not trade again until Monday, when it opened at $28.35.

The change from close to open was $28.35 divided by $35.61, minus one: a fall of 20.39%. A holder with a stop order to sell at, say, $33 on the Friday had no chance to sell at $33; the first price available on Monday was $28.35. That is the weekend problem in one number.

The weekend problem

A stock market fund holding a round-the-clock asset trades only on weekdays: 6.5 hours in the regular session, plus the early and late sessions some brokers offer, as of 25 Sep 2026. Bitcoin trades for all 168 hours of the week. Whatever happens from Friday evening to Monday morning arrives all at once, at the next open.

This is not a fault of any one fund. It is built into the wrapper. The shares cannot trade over a weekend, so the price catches up in a single jump rather than a slide, the kind of opening move the gap trading page describes.

It cuts both ways. A weekend rally arrives as a gap up. The point is not that the fund loses money over weekends, but that neither a buyer nor a seller can act on the news until Monday.

The original data

The data: every IBIT trading day from its first, 11 Jan 2024, to 24 Sep 2026, 678 sessions of daily opens and closes from Yahoo Finance, downloaded on 25 Sep 2026. Each session’s open is compared with the previous session’s close, which gives 677 overnight gaps, published as a CSV of IBIT opening gaps.

Split them by what came in between. 141 followed a weekend, including long weekends with a Friday or Monday holiday. The other 536 gaps followed a single weeknight, or in 10 cases a one-day midweek holiday.

After a weeknight or midweek holiday, the median open was 1.15% away from the last close. 152 of the 536, or 28.4%, were 2% or more, and 27, or 5.0%, were 4% or more.

After a weekend, the median gap was 1.72%. 65 of the 141, or 46.1%, were 2% or more, and 22, or 15.6%, were 4% or more: three times the weeknight rate.

The largest weeknight gap was 8.04%, from 5 to 6 Mar 2024, and the largest weekend gap was the 20.39% fall in August 2024 described above. The weekend figures run larger because the fund cannot trade for two days while bitcoin does.

How close the funds stayed to the coin. From the 11 Jan 2024 close to the 24 Sep 2026 close, IBIT rose 79.5% and FBTC 79.6%. Yahoo’s bitcoin price rose 82.0% between its daily closes on the same two dates, from $46,368.59 to $84,379.06; the three changes are in a CSV of the fund returns.

The shortfall of about 2.4 points has two parts that this data cannot separate: the funds’ fees, and the fact that Yahoo marks bitcoin’s day at midnight UTC, three hours after the New York close on 11 Jan 2024 and four hours after it on 24 Sep 2026.

Video coverage has barely started. In the 24,971-video corpus this site studies, 4 titles contain the words bitcoin ETF or crypto ETF, or the ticker IBIT, from 3 channels, at a median of 7,516 views. Two are news segments. Each video is counted once.

When it fails

The gap after the close. As the data shows, almost half of all weekend openings in IBIT moved 2% or more. A stop order to sell becomes a market order once triggered and is filled at the first available price, which after a bad weekend can be far below the level the order named.

The wrapper at the open. In the first minutes of trading, the bid-ask spread can be wider while market makers settle on a price. A market order sent at the bell pays for that.

Holding the same thing twice. A trader who already holds bitcoin on an exchange and buys a fund of it adds to the same exposure, and the fund side carries a yearly fee and a price that moves only on weekdays.

Mistaking approval for endorsement. The SEC’s order finds that the exchanges’ rules meet the Exchange Act. That is a ruling on listing rules, and it does not make the coin less volatile.

And the coin itself. The fund removes the need for a wallet and a crypto exchange account. It does not remove bitcoin’s own swings, which in this period included a single weekend that took a fifth off the fund’s price.

Related

The bitcoin page covers the coin these funds hold and how trading it directly differs from trading a fund. The ETF investing page walks through buying any fund with a limit order and reading what it holds. And the gap trading page explains the opening jumps that the data above measures, as they show up in any stock.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.