Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) has been the top-performing asset class in 11 of the past 15 years. Yet since its all-time high in October 2025, the coin has fallen by a brutal 39%.

So for someone investing for a retirement that’s expected to be a couple of decades from now, it’s reasonable to wonder if this asset belongs anywhere near your nest egg. Here’s what the research says.

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It’s best to have at least a little exposure

In theory, Bitcoin is an investment that could be good to have in a retirement savings portfolio because it’s a scarce store of value. While there’s not much of a guarantee that its price will be high, the coin’s ever-constricting drip of new supply from mining ensures that it’ll be harder and harder to come by over time, which tends to push its price upward over the long term.

It’s those exact properties that increasingly make Bitcoin a favorite of institutional investors.

For instance, Fidelity Digital Assets published a report earlier this year, arguing that going from a 0% Bitcoin allocation to even a small allocation is among the most consequential (and beneficial) portfolio decisions an investor can make. Per the report, which corroborates earlier Fidelity research on the same topic, the biggest improvement in risk-adjusted returns comes from allocating the first 1% of a portfolio’s total value to Bitcoin. Assuming that the portfolio was diversified with a standard 60/40 mix of stocks and bonds beforehand, adding that small Bitcoin allocation boosted annual returns on the order of 2%, but only increased the portfolio’s maximum drawdown by around 0.5%.

And that’s a decent argument for including the coin in retirement portfolios.

Avoiding the volatility tax

One important thing to recognize here is that Bitcoin’s risk doesn’t scale linearly with your allocation; it accelerates. According to the Fidelity report, replacing 1% of a 60/40 portfolio with Bitcoin contributed about 2.7% of total portfolio volatility, but a 5% allocation contributed 17.8% — potentially enough additional volatility to make an experienced investor a bit nauseous from time to time. So if you decide to include the asset in your retirement portfolio, you’ll need a risk management strategy.

In short, you should plan to keep Bitcoin between 1% and 5% of your total portfolio, and lean toward the lower end of that range if you’re within a decade of retiring. A longer runway gives you more time to recover from the 40% to 80% drawdowns this asset has experienced in every one of its halving cycles.