In the world of crypto, there's one overarching relative theme that governs the entire asset class.
That is, Bitcoin vs everything else.
Over the years, this simple trend has dominated the asset class for so long. Due to the sheer size of Bitcoin compared to the others, when it's in a leadership position, it scoops up so much capital that most of the other coins are forced to wait for their turn.
Could this change?
It would only make sense, especially as the market-caps of the other altcoins grow.
Viewers are asked to count how many times basketball players wearing white shirts passed a ball while someone in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the scene, thumps their chest, and walks off.
Despite looking straight at the gorilla, over half of the people who watch the video completely miss it.
It's a hilarious showcase of how we can often miss what's right in front of our very own eyes. Psychologists call it inattentional blindness, and it's a very real thing.
People are always trying to find a narrative about why the market's behaving as it is. This is arguably more prevalent in crypto, where people base their investment decisions on stories of a new "global currency", or god forbid the arguments of Bitcoin being a "better store of value."
But in occupying ourselves with all these stories, we can often miss what's right in front of us.
The strength coming out of crypto in recent weeks has been impressive, and for the first time in many months, we can say that the bulls are in the driving seat.
The median change for all coins above $1B in market-cap in just the last 20 days, since Bitcoin bottomed, is a whopping 53%! In this same period, nearly 100,000 Bitcoin have been withdrawn from exchanges, and many more hundreds of millions of dollars committed to short positions were liquidated as the accumulation for these digital assets has ramped up.
Long story short, the cryptocurrency landscape looks the best it has in a long while, and we're subsequently looking for more names to express this bullish thesis of ours.
Of course, in the crypto world these adages don't make too much sense. So, just like how we say that "Tether's a position too,"in crypto it can be said that "patience pays sats."
But all jokes aside, Bitcoin has fallen back below 41,000, placing prices right back into this range. With Bitcoin below this level, new longs are likely to stumble in the coming days/weeks.
At least in the near term, some level of patience is warranted.
So while we're anticipating we ultimately resolve higher, the only question that remains is "how long?"
Regardless of the market environment, we always want to be pushing our bets on secular leaders.
The most effective way of positioning ourselves with the strongest (or weakest) names is through relative strength analysis - by simply comparing names to their counterparts.
So before we dive into all some of the names we're buying, let's address where this space finds itself, and what we're anticipating in the coming weeks and months.
There's a permeating myth that altcoins need to outperform Bitcoin for there to be a healthy bull market.
You'll often hear claims like "the Ethereum/Bitcoin ratio is making new lows, so the market can't go up."
A similar notion gets thrown in the stock market, that if equal-weight S&P 500 is underperforming its cap-weight counterpart, breadth is said to be "unhealthy".
Though, we've found that to be far from the truth.
In the case of crypto, there have been countless times where the relative leadership has not been in the altcoins, but yet the asset class did just fine.
Just a few short quarters ago, before the alt season kicked off earlier this year, Bitcoin was outperforming nearly every other major coin as seen by the continued progress in its market-cap dominance:
It's fair to say that bulls scored some points in the last few days, with Bitcoin moving back up to the upper 30,000's.
Throughout this recent rally, it was pretty clear that there was a lot of squeeze-action going on, as over $900M in Bitcoin shorts were liquidated in the last 24-hours...