Nine Altcoins joined Hayloo’s Altcoin Tax™ board this week, and most of them showed up owing a tax to Bitcoin.
Last week we told you our Beta Desk was building Altcoin Tax™ reads for Avalanche (AVAX), BNB, Dogecoin (DOGE), Hedera (HBAR), Chainlink (LINK), Litecoin (LTC), NEAR Protocol (NEAR), TRON (TRX), and Zcash (ZEC). Now they sit next to Ether (ETH), Solana (SOL), and XRP.
Ten of the twelve pay Hayloo’s Altcoin Tax™, and so does the altcoin basket. They hand back more on Bitcoin’s down days than they collect on its up days. Two coins make Bitcoin pay instead, and they sit at opposite ends of the board: one barely follows Bitcoin at all, and the other swings harder than almost any other coin. Read more about them in this week’s edition of Hayloo’s Altcoin Tax™, below.
Hayloo has money on this. We’re short ETH and SOL, and both pay Hayloo’s Altcoin Tax™ this week. When Bitcoin falls, ETH and SOL fall harder.
Then there’s NEAR, this week’s free focus coin, with the heaviest Altcoin Tax™ bill on our board and a warning flag that just went up.
◆ COIN OF THE WEEK · NEAR’s flag went from CLEAR to FIRED this week
NEAR: The Flag Is Up on the Board’s Heaviest Bill
If you hold NEAR to beat Bitcoin, here’s your tab. Of every dollar Bitcoin gained, NEAR kept 62 cents. Of every dollar Bitcoin lost, NEAR gave back $2.72. That’s 4.4× more downside than upside, and NEAR has paid the tax for 41 days straight.
This summer, NEAR drank for free. In July and early August it caught far more of Bitcoin’s rallies than it gave back in the drops, and the gap between the two sat deep in the green. The two lines crossed on September 9. NEAR has picked up the tab every day since.
The worst day came last Thursday, October 15, when Bitcoin slipped under $80,000 for about two hours. NEAR’s gap hit −2.65 that day, its widest. On the week the bill eased: NEAR gave back $2.72 on Bitcoin’s down days, from $3.09, and kept 62 cents on the up days, from 65. The gap narrowed from −2.44 to −2.10. Over 20 days it is still wider by 0.79. A smaller bill is still a bill.
So why is the warning flag up? Swinging hard is nothing new for NEAR. It has spent 84.4% of our record in High Beta, the tag for a coin that swings harder than Bitcoin in both directions. The tag doesn’t mean NEAR is winning. It means it’s swinging.
The flag went up because the swinging made us sick. NEAR’s 60-day beta, how far it tends to move when Bitcoin moves, rose from 1.29 to 1.52, the highest reading in the recent window. It has climbed 0.36 in 20 trading days, from 1.15 on September 29. That’s more than twice the 0.15 move that trips the desk’s flag.
The flag says the ground under NEAR’s numbers is moving. After 81 quiet days in High Beta, NEAR’s link to Bitcoin is shifting.
Flag: MONITOR · Stability: UNSTABLE. The flag went from clear to fired on the speed of the beta move alone, up 0.36 in 20 trading days from 1.15 to 1.52. Stability reads unstable: the relationship is shifting fast enough that any read more than about three weeks out is on shaky ground.
Where we go from here: The twelve coins in today’s article bring long, backtested records to Hayloo’s Altcoin Tax™ board, and that opens the door to the young ones. A coin like Hyperliquid (HYPE) hasn’t been around long enough to build a Beta record . Our desk can now match a young coin like HYPE to the regime of an older coin, and read the young coin’s beta from there. Stay tuned.
Our book is short Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana. People behind Hayloo may hold any coin discussed here, in either direction. Nothing here is advice to buy or sell.
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How to read the Altcoin Tax™
Every week Hayloo measures how the major altcoins move against Bitcoin. Beta is the simple version: how far a coin tends to move when Bitcoin moves. Up-capture is the share of Bitcoin’s gains a coin keeps on Bitcoin’s up days. Down-capture is the share of Bitcoin’s losses it gives back on Bitcoin’s down days.
The gap between those two is Hayloo’s Altcoin Tax™. When a coin gives back more on the way down than it collects on the way up, it pays the tax. When it collects more than it gives back, it charges Bitcoin the tax instead.
The regime tag says how hard a coin swings against Bitcoin. High Beta means it swings harder than Bitcoin in both directions, not that it is winning. The flag fires on a fast move in the beta, a gap closing toward zero, a change of regime, or fast and slow windows that disagree. These are signals we trade. Stability says how far out our read holds.
Ten coins pay, two collect, and our money sits on two of the payers. Behind the paywall: which two altcoins make Bitcoin pay, where Bitcoin’s share of the market sits after Sunday’s high; every coin new to the board, each with its flag; and what’s solid and what’s soft.