If you invested $1,000 in gold, Bitcoin and $TRUMP on Inauguration Day, here is what each is worth today

Pick any investor who watched Donald Trump walk back into the White House on January 20, 2025 and decided to put money into the three most talked-about assets surrounding that moment.

Bitcoin, the asset Trump had openly embraced. Gold, the safe haven that has anchored portfolios for centuries. And the TRUMP memecoin, the token bearing the president’s name that had launched three days earlier and was already being called the trade of the inauguration.

Here is what $1,000 in each one looks like today, August 4, 2026.

Bitcoin: Down 40%

Bitcoin opened inauguration day at approximately $102,000. A $1,000 investment bought roughly 0.0098 BTC. Today, with Bitcoin trading near $62,000, that position is worth approximately $607, a loss of 40%.

The irony is hard to miss. Trump entered office as the most openly crypto-friendly president in American history. He signed the GENIUS Act. He signed an Executive Order to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

He called the U.S. the crypto capital of the world. And Bitcoin still lost 40% of its value on his watch.

What makes the Bitcoin loss particularly striking is the context surrounding it. This was not a hostile administration. Trump’s team established the first ever Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in March 2025, halting all government Bitcoin sales and signaling long-term institutional commitment at the sovereign level.

The policy environment was the most favorable in Bitcoin’s history. And yet the price fell from where it stood on the day that all of that became official. The lesson is not that Bitcoin is broken.

It is that even the best policy tailwind cannot override a global liquidity squeeze, a hawkish Fed, and overleveraged positions unwinding at scale.

Gold: Up 22%

Gold was trading at approximately $2,697 per ounce on January 20, 2025. A $1,000 investment bought 0.371 ounces.

At today’s gold price of approximately $3,300, that position is worth $1,224, a gain of 22%. The same presidency that was supposed to supercharge crypto turned out to be gold’s best friend.

Tariff wars, US-Iran military strikes, persistent inflation, and a Fed locked into a hawkish position all sent money into gold every time uncertainty spiked.

The metal hit an all-time high above $5,500 per ounce earlier this year. Nobody on inauguration day was putting their money into gold to ride a Trump presidency. They should have.

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What makes gold’s performance particularly uncomfortable for the crypto community is that it did not require any catalyst beyond the macro environment that Trump’s own policies created.

Gold does not have a halving cycle. It does not have ETF inflows to track or whale wallets to monitor. It simply rises when trust in financial institutions erodes and when inflation stays elevated longer than central banks predicted.

Trump coin: Down 97%

The TRUMP memecoin was trading at approximately $45.47 on January 20, 2025, already down sharply from its $74.27 all-time high hit two days earlier.

A $1,000 investment at inauguration prices bought roughly 22 coins. At today’s price of $1.47, those coins are worth approximately $32.

A loss of 97%. Nearly the entire investment gone. While Trump himself disclosed over $1.4 billion in crypto income in his 2025 financial filings, largely from TRUMP coin royalties, the investors who bought on inauguration day are sitting on one of the worst-performing positions of the entire cycle.

The investors who bought at $45 on inauguration day were not making a financial decision. They were making a political one. And the market, as it always does, treated the two very differently.

The scorecard

Three assets. Same $1,000. Same start date. Gold: $1,224. Bitcoin: $607. Trump Coin: $32.

The most crypto-friendly administration in history produced one winner, and it was the asset that has been around for thousands of years and does not have a ticker symbol.

This story was originally published by TheStreet on Aug 4, 2026, where it first appeared in the MARKETS section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

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