Why the winner keeps changing
These three strategies aren't competing on skill — they're each structurally suited to a different market shape. Buy and hold wins when there's a sustained trend to hold through, because every dollar is exposed from day one. DCA wins when the period has a real drawdown followed by recovery, because averaging in mechanically buys more coins on the cheap days without requiring you to call the bottom. A grid bot wins when price oscillates inside a range without a clear direction, because it's structurally designed to sell high and buy low on repeat inside that band — and it structurally loses in a strong trend, because it keeps taking profit into a rising market and can run out of buy-side capital in a falling one. Run last year on BTC, then run the last 90 days — the ranking rarely stays the same twice.
What this report does and doesn't capture
The grid bot simulation here uses daily high/low, not order-book fills — it assumes every price level the candle's wick touched during the day would have been filled, which is usually a reasonable approximation for a wide grid but can overstate fills for a very tight grid on a volatile day. It also ignores exchange trading fees, which on a busy grid bot doing dozens of round trips can meaningfully eat into the realized edge — a 0.1% taker fee on 50 round trips is roughly 10% of capital in fees alone, easily larger than the grid's edge in a quiet period. The DCA and buy-and-hold legs ignore fees too, for a fair three-way comparison, and none of the three account for slippage, funding costs on leveraged versions, or taxes. Treat this as a shape-of-the-market comparison, not a promise of what any specific bot or exchange fee schedule would have returned. For the fee-aware version of the grid math alone, see the Grid Spacing Calculator, which nets out the fee floor per fill.