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.
Tax collection on Hayloo’s board is brisk this week, with 11 of the 12 major altcoins paying the Altcoin Tax™. The twelfth charges Bitcoin the tax, and we cover that outlier further down in today’s read. Our free coin of the week is ZEC, because it pays the highest tax on the board.
◆ FOCUS COIN
ZEC
Privacy bought ZEC’s holders no cover this week. For every dollar Bitcoin gained, ZEC caught 54 cents. Every dollar Bitcoin lost cost ZEC 278 cents. That is the kind of tax bill an accountant reads twice. ZEC’s Tax gap of -2.23 is the widest on Hayloo’s board, with 5.1 times more downside than upside. ZEC has paid the Altcoin Tax™ for 36 days straight. This week its up-capture fell from 1.46 to 0.54 and its down-capture rose from 2.42 to 2.78. The Tax gap widened from -0.95 to -2.23.
ZEC has lived in High Beta for 142 days. High Beta means the coin swings harder than Bitcoin in both directions. ZEC keeps swinging hard. Last week it wasn’t winning the rounds. Its 60-day beta eased from 1.95 to 1.70 this week, which puts it close to the Low Beta line at 1.33, 0.37 above it. The 30-day and 60-day windows agree.
Flag: CLEAR · Stability: STABLE. The flag that fired last week cleared this week, and nothing in ZEC’s numbers tripped a wire. The 30-day beta runs hot at 2.59, far above the 60-day beta of 1.70. The 60-day beta is the signal we trade. The 30-day is giving us a heads-up. ZEC spent the whole summer as a high beta coin, as the cross-section heatmap shows. We read the 30-day running above the 60-day as a noisy signal on short timeframes. It points to ZEC keeping a high beta relationship with Bitcoin in the near future, which can be an interesting read for traders who hold allocations for a short time.
Paid subscribers get the full board of all 12 major altcoins and the basket, where Bitcoin dominance stands against its recent peak, and every coin’s section. You also get the name of the one coin that charges Bitcoin the Altcoin Tax™ this week.
A beta desk from Hayloo’s sources you can plug into your cross-margined exchange data or your AI system is being built. Join the waitlist.
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 and approved by us. It’s published by Hayloo INC., our latest AI startup in Panama.
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.
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.