How widely the market is outperforming Bitcoin. Not by how much, and not which ones. Just the share of large tokens that did better than Bitcoin did over the same window. The idea behind it is that a market where two tokens rocket and forty eight sink is a different market from one where thirty five of fifty quietly beat Bitcoin, even if the headline index looks the same on both days. Breadth is what this measures.
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The plain description
How widely the market is outperforming Bitcoin. Not by how much, and not which ones. Just the share of large tokens that did better than Bitcoin did over the same window.
The idea behind it is that a market where two tokens rocket and forty eight sink is a different market from one where thirty five of fifty quietly beat Bitcoin, even if the headline index looks the same on both days. Breadth is what this measures.
Stated so you could reproduce it
Take the fifty largest tokens by market cap, excluding Bitcoin itself and excluding the stablecoins, since a stablecoin will essentially never beat anything and would only drag the reading down.
Count how many of them had a higher percentage return than Bitcoin over the last thirty days. Divide by fifty. That is the number.
It is computed here, from public price data, because there is no authoritative source for it. The best known published version is a web page with no API and a slightly different sample, so our reading and theirs will not match exactly. Both are one person's choice of sample size and window, and neither is official.
The bands, and what each one actually means
| Reading | What it indicates |
|---|---|
| 75 and above | Usually called alt season. Three quarters of the large alts are beating Bitcoin, which is broad rather than concentrated strength. |
| 50 to 74 | Leaning toward alts. More than half are ahead, but not decisively. |
| 26 to 49 | Leaning toward Bitcoin. Money is favouring the largest asset. |
| 25 and below | Usually called Bitcoin season. Three quarters of the large alts are behind Bitcoin over the window. |
The part that gets left out
- The thresholds are convention, not arithmetic. Nothing happens at 75. It is a round number somebody picked, and it has been repeated since.
- It is a backward looking measure over a fixed window. A reading of 80 says the last thirty days were broad. It does not say the next thirty will be.
- A high reading is not a buy signal. Historically the highest readings have clustered near the end of strong runs, not the start, which is the opposite of how the number is usually used.
- Changing the window changes the answer. Ninety days and thirty days routinely disagree, and neither is the correct one.