Hayloo’s Altcoin Tax. Beta is one number: when Bitcoin moves one percent, how far does the other coin move? Beta above one is an altcoin amplifying Bitcoin. A beta below one damps Bitcoin’s moves. The desk splits that number by direction — what a coin catches on Bitcoin’s up-days against what it hands back on the down-days. Hand back more than you catch and your portfolio is paying the altcoin tax.
One session did most of this week’s work. On August 28 Bitcoin fell 3.1%. The altcoin basket fell 3.1% with it, Solana and XRP both fell 4.7%, and Ether fell 2.7%. Three of the four measurements moved because of it.
The cross-section spread out.
The distance between the lowest (Total3ES) and highest (XRP) reading is 0.67 against 0.59 a week ago. XRP did the moving: its sixty-day beta was 1.04 twenty trading days ago and reads 1.52 now, a shift of 0.47 that took it from the middle of the board to the top. We used XRP’s outperformance as an exit signal from our spot positions.
Solana crossed , and it is the coin we are short.
Of every dollar Bitcoin gained, Solana caught 97 cents. Of every dollar Bitcoin lost, it handed back 113 cents. Four Bitcoin down-days entered the window and Solana over-dropped on every one of them. This is why we sold our SOL last week, why we closed our long-hedge, and doubled our short. It was in the Beta. This week, we get confirmation.
The level itself is unremarkable for Solana. At −0.16 the gap sits at the fifty-first percentile of the coin’s own history, the median across that history is −0.17, and Solana has spent two-thirds of its life on the negative side of the beta.
XRP is top of the board and underwater on its own chain.
187 cents caught against 93 handed back, two times more upside than downside, and eighty straight days on the favorable side. Then look at the coin itself: spot sits at realized price of $1.47, roughly half of supply is in profit, and the coins that moved this week moved at a loss. A coin can amplify Bitcoin’s percentage moves beautifully and still be a place where the average holder loses money, and XRP is currently both. After selling 50% of our spot at a 500% profit a week ago, we flagged another 30% for selling into strength. Even with another cloture vote on the Clarity Act coming up in a little under two weeks, our book is currently being repositioned for a world of unclarity. And we’re looking for entries into LINK, HYPE, AAVE, PYTH and ZEC.
The TOTAL3ES basket’s gap reopened.
Of every dollar Bitcoin gained, the altcoin complex caught 76 cents; of every dollar Bitcoin lost, it handed back 89. That is 1.2 times more downside than upside and it has held on that side for twenty-eight days.
Down-capture is what moved, from 75 cents to 89, while up-capture barely shifted. The basket has been Trailing for 216 days against a 61-day median across two dozen historical runs, and Trailing is where it spends 76.9% of its life. This is not a rotation failing to arrive. It is the ordinary state of the complex reasserting itself.
On our use of AI:
We’re a private crypto fund out of Switzerland. We built a Neurosymbolic Compound AI System for our own desk: it follows our strategies, it reads the news that affect our portfolio, it sits on a database going back decades, and brings math to our everyday emotions. We call it Hayloo. It’s our best hire. This Substack is compiled by Hayloo.
Humans have written machine-assisted for centuries. What never changes is who decides.
Nothing at Hayloo INC. was ever decided by a machine.
What we publish is what we defend as a team. When it’s wrong, it’s wrong because humans signed it.
Jordi Federer, Founder, Hayloo INC.
Ether still catches more than it hands back.
146 cents caught against 102 handed back, 1.4 times more upside than downside, and it has held the favorable side for twenty-nine days. Both numbers fell this week and down-capture fell faster, which widened the gap to 0.44 — and the reason matters. The gap widened because the weaker number weakened faster, not because Ether’s upside improved. Ether’s own history populates only two states, Trailing at 78% and Outperform at 22%, and it is sixty-two days into an Outperform run whose median length is four and a half days.
Bitcoin is taking share back.
Bitcoin’s portion of total crypto market value reads 59.1%, above its 50-day average of 58.4% and a tenth of a point under its 150-day at 59.2%. It is three points above the 56.1% low set on August 14. Rising dominance means Bitcoin is taking share and everything else is losing it, and the basket’s capture data points the same way.
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