ALTs Are Holding Up

Now that we are officially in a bear market...

There is no denying it, we are in a bear. It feels especially "unfair" and shocking to ALT coin hodlers because there wasn't a bull market to begin with. ALTs got completely obliterated and the big question now is how they will perform in a bear market when they are already trading at ATLs.

From my last post it seems to me that ALTs have around the same amount to fall as BTC (even a bit less). But the real point is that we are probably already close to the bottom if we continue to get less volatility throughout the cycles. But how will ALTs perform in this period and beyond? My premise is that ALTs might actually outperform BTC over the next months and even years. This would be shocking of course, since this hasn't really happened in the previous cycles. But we can already see that things are different...

Proof?

In November I pointed out that OTHERS/BTC was already on an upward trend since summer of 2025. Here is an updated chart:

If we dismiss the 10/10 event, OTHERS are actually up by 20% since summer of 2025. This might feel surprising since our portfolios haven't exactly made a come back. But compared to BTC most ALTs have actually performed better than BTC.

Important things to note:

we can clearly see that ALTs have had a much longer bear market than previously: Instead of around a year, we have seen 3.5 years of a downward trend!
upward trends have generally lasted for around 2 years. If this happens again, we could see a peak in 2027. But this wouldn't fit the BTC cycle which apparently is still in tact. So could we get a 4 year upward momentum until 2029? Or will the real upward trend start in 2027 giving us 2 more years of pain?

Conclusion

Honestly, it is probably a smart idea to short the market for the foreseeable future. The bear has hit like clockwork, but everyone was still hoping for an ALT coin rally. Now that this hasn't happened, we could perhaps still see a relative strength for ALTs compared to BTC, mainly because they are already near or below their ATLs. Or to put it differently, there are hardly any sellers left and the "few" that are still holding their bags probably don't want to sell at a staggering loss. Unfortunately for ALT coin hodlers we could still sit on our bags for years to come before perhaps turning them into a profit again. That is, if your coin/project actually survives.

As a general reminder: Please keep in mind that none of this is official investment advice! Crypto trading entails a great deal of risk; never spend money that you can't afford to lose!