Post Puts $10,000 From the Covid Crash at $205,000 in Ethereum

An Instagram trading account, advicefromtraders, put a scoreboard in front of its followers this week. The question it asks is simple. What would $10,000 be worth today if it had gone in during the March 2020 Covid crash? Ethereum tops the answer at $205,000, and gold comes last at $28,500.

Ethereum, $205,000
Altcoins, $195,000
Bitcoin, $130,000
Silver, $50,000
Stocks, $33,000
Gold, $28,500

"If you had invested $10,000 when the Covid crash happened, you would have:" the caption reads, and both of the first two slides repeat it.

The chart under the list

The second slide carries a TradingView chart that produces those dollar figures. ETHUSDT is marked +1,926.01%, BTCUSDT +1,224.36%, OTHERS +1,040.02%, silver +400.81% and gold +185.25%. Its y-axis runs from -250.00% at the bottom to 4,000.00% at the top, and its x-axis is labelled 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Applied to $10,000, four of those percentages land almost exactly on the list. ETHUSDT gives $202,601 against the $205,000 quoted, BTCUSDT gives $132,436 against $130,000, silver gives $50,081 against $50,000 and gold gives $28,525 against $28,500.

The fifth reading does not fit. OTHERS on TradingView tracks altcoin market value outside the largest coins, and +1,040.02% on $10,000 comes to $114,002. The list says $195,000. Those are the post's own two numbers for the same asset, and they do not reconcile. The $33,000 for stocks has no chart line at all. It implies a 3.3x, which works back to an entry near 2,300 on the index; Trading Economics had the S&P 500 at 7,595.87 on Tuesday, down 0.33% on the session.

The entry date does most of the work

Nothing in the post names the day it buys, and that matters more than any single percentage. Bitcoin is the clearest case. Cointelegraph, writing on the anniversary of the crash, put the 12 March 2020 bottom at $3,600 after a fall from about $8,000. CryptoPotato, covering the same day, said the price dipped below $4,000. The comparison also runs against a moving target on the crypto side, where bitcoin has traded near $78,000 through the past week; it opened Tuesday at $78,181.33 and had slipped to $76,931.56 by 7:24 a.m. ET, Yahoo Finance reported. Buy at $3,600 and $10,000 becomes roughly $213,000. Buy at $4,000 and it becomes roughly $192,000. Both are far above the $130,000 the post prints, and the post's own +1,224.36% works back to an entry nearer $5,800.

Metals hold up better than the crypto lines

Gold was $4,418 an ounce on 9 September, Fortune reported, up $751 over the year. Silver stood at $62.88 on 14 September, Forbes Advisor said, inside a 52-week range of $41.13 to $121.58. Run the post's percentages backwards and they imply entries near $1,549 for gold and $12.55 for silver. Neither figure is unreasonable for March 2020, but we could not tie either one to a specific session that month. Ethereum sits in the same position: at $2,515.17 at Tuesday's open and $2,480.37 by mid-morning, the claimed +1,926.01% implies an entry around $122.

What survives the checking

The order holds. Ethereum ahead of bitcoin, and both well ahead of metals and stocks, is what the years since the crash have delivered, and nothing in the checking changes that. The dollar amounts are the softer part. This desk has checked the same kind of arithmetic before, most recently in a viral slide deck that put bitcoin at $1.2 million. Here the weak points are narrower. One entry date the post never gives, and one figure, the $195,000 for altcoins, that its own chart puts at $114,002.