The number that changes everything: 88.5%
If you read a typical crypto report covering the top 50 coins, you get a softened picture. About half of the top-50 assets are bear profiles over multi-year horizons, the other half holds up or runs. The world looks balanced.
Expand the sample to all 269 Binance USDT spot pairs with at least 100 weekly candles of history, and the picture flips.
238 out of 269 assets — 88.5% of the universe — close their entire test period with negative average buy & hold CAGR. Only 19 assets (7.1%) are clean bull profiles, 12 (4.5%) sideways. The rest? Losers.
The median Avg B&H CAGR across the entire universe: −38.6% per year. A randomly selected Binance USDT pair would have lost almost 40% per year on the median — over 8 years.
And that's the polished version.
Binance is already a filter — and it's still not enough
Binance has a comparatively strict listing process. Coins that list here have already passed a pre-filter against DEX-only junk, obvious rugpulls, and insufficient liquidity. The 269 assets in our dataset are not "everything crypto has ever produced" — they are what survived the Binance filter.
The DEX tail below this is orders of magnitude more brutal.
Even so: within this pre-filtered universe, 88.5% of assets lose money. The filter eliminates total-loss candidates — the slow value erosion of the survivors comes free of charge.
And subsequent delistings are not a fringe phenomenon. Between March 18 and April 21, 2026 alone, Binance delisted at least 43 USDT spot pairs — tokens a passive holder could realistically have held in their portfolio, now simply disappearing from the tradable universe with all the losses that implies.
The market cap gradient: the further from the mainstream, the more bearish
One of the most revealing tables in the bulk backtest is the breakdown by CoinGecko rank tiers:
| Cluster | n | Median Avg B&H | % positive B&H | Median Max DD |
|----------------------|-----|----------------|----------------|---------------|
| Large Cap (1–10) | 7 | +39.9% | 100% | −51.1% |
| Mid Cap (11–50) | 15 | −1.7% | 67% | −67.4% |
| Small Cap (51–200) | 53 | −29.2% | 62% | −68.7% |
| Micro / Tail (>200) | 194 | −45.2% | 28% | −72.1% |
This is an almost textbook gradient. On large caps, passive holding is efficient: 100% of top-10 assets in the sample have positive Avg B&H CAGR. In mid-cap territory it tilts to neutral. In small caps, passive holding becomes a coin flip. And in micro and long-tail territory (194 assets — the largest group!) only one in four tokens ends with positive passive returns.
Bitcoin: the lone, clean buy & hold asset
Within the dataset, Bitcoin is the cleanest case for passive holding:
- Avg Buy & Hold CAGR: +39.9% over 8+ years
- Strategy CAGR: +49.2% (strategy beats B&H by 9.3 pp)
- Strategy Max Drawdown: −32.4% — the lowest among all bull assets in the sample
- Risk-adjusted ratio 1.52 — rank 7 in the entire 269-asset universe
Bitcoin wins both passively and systematically. The strategy delivers a moderate edge on BTC plus significantly reduced drawdown — but anyone who simply bought and held has annualized around 40% over the past 8 years. That's the honest truth about the only crypto asset you can defend without a system.
Extended to all top-10 coins: 7 assets, 100% positive strategy CAGR, all with positive B&H CAGR. On this tier the allocation question is genuinely close — strategy beats B&H in only 43% of cases. On BNB, SOL, and LINK, concentrated holding would have substantially beaten the strategy.
The altcoin truth in one number
Step out of the top-10 comfort zone, and the picture flips radically:
- Median Avg B&H in mid caps (rank 11–50): −1.7%
- Median Avg B&H in small caps (rank 51–200): −29.2%
- Median Avg B&H in micro/tail (rank >200): −45.2%
Anyone who passively holds altcoins beyond the top 10 builds a portfolio in which the median performer loses double digits per year. Half the mid caps. Two thirds of the small caps. Three quarters of the micro caps.
This isn't bad luck. It's the structural truth of a market where new tokens launch constantly, almost all fail to hold their initial hype, and only a tiny fraction creates value over multiple years.
The top 10 aren't forever either
Before anyone reads this as "then just hold the top 10": today's top 10 is not the top 10 of 5 years ago.
EOS, NEM, IOTA, ICX, NEO, OMG, MIOTA, XEM, ETC — all tokens that held firm top-10 positions in earlier years. Today they sit far beyond rank #100 or have disappeared from the market entirely. A passive holder who bought and held the top 10 of 2018 is sitting on rubble today — with Bitcoin and Ethereum as the only reliable constants.
Survivorship risk exists in the top 10 too. It's just less visible because today's composition is defined by today's winners.
If you trade altcoins, trade them systematically
Here's the second half of the story. On the same universe, with the same data foundation, a simple unfiltered RSI/SMA cross strategy on weekly candles beats Average Buy & Hold on 246 out of 269 assets — a 91.4% hit rate.
The edge isn't evenly distributed. It's regime-specific and concentrates exactly where passive holding suffers most:
| Profile | Assets | Median Diff (Strat − B&H) | % beats B&H |
|-----------|--------|---------------------------|-------------|
| Bull | 19 | +5.2 pp | 58% |
| Sideways | 12 | +18.5 pp | 75% |
| Bear | 238 | +29.9 pp | 95% |
| **Total** | 269 | **+25.4 pp** | **91.4%** |
On bear assets — that is, on 88.5% of the universe — the strategy beats B&H in 95% of cases, with median outperformance of 30 percentage points. It doesn't turn the long tail into a goldmine. But it makes it playable.
The probability that a randomly selected asset closes with positive end returns rises from roughly 12% (passive) to 39% (with strategy) — a factor of 3.
The conclusion in one sentence
You can hold Bitcoin. You have to trade altcoins.
Anyone convinced that a particular mid- or small-cap asset will outperform long-term takes on, by passively holding it, a bet with unfavorable success probability — even within the Binance pre-filtered universe. The historical data foundation across 269 assets and 8 years shows: on average, this holder loses money, often double digits per year.
The alternative isn't "then just buy Bitcoin" — although that's a perfectly rational default. The alternative is: if you want to be active in altcoins, do it with a system that at least partially compensates for the asymmetry between bull and bear phases on the asset side.
The RSI/SMA strategy on weekly candles is one of the simplest possible implementations of that idea. It's not perfect — on bull assets like SOL, BNB, and LINK it underperforms B&H clearly. But across the overwhelming majority of the universe, it lifts the probability of success from 1-in-8 to roughly 2-in-5.
That's the difference between a market where you systematically lose and a market where you systematically have a chance.
Read the full backtest
This blog post only summarizes the main thread. The full Full Insight Report on the RSI/SMA 1W crypto strategy across all 269 Binance USDT pairs contains:
- The complete rankings (top 20 by CAGR, by outperformance, by risk-adjusted return)
- Three rebrand deep-dives (MATIC→POL, FTM→Sonic, MKR→Sky) with asset multiplier math
- Cluster analyses by market cap, asset age, and volatility
- The moonrun caveat on bull asset underperformance
- The hybrid allocation section (90/10, 70/30, 50/50, 30/70)
- The complete 269-asset table as an appendix
→ Get the Full Insight Report (€49.99)
Looking for something more compact? There's also a Quick Insight Report on the top 50 coins (€19.99).
Disclaimer: This article is analysis and commentary for educational purposes. Not investment advice. Past performance is not an indicator of future results. Crypto trading carries substantial risk, including the possibility of total loss. Do your own research before deploying capital.