Measure crypto in USD and the world looks friendly. Bitcoin at 100k+, Ethereum solid, a handful of alts with three- to four-digit returns over the last 8 years. Sure, not all of them — but the picture is survivable.
Measure those same coins in BTC — the unit crypto natives actually think in — and the picture flips radically.
We ran every actively trading Binance Spot BTC-pair through a simple, unfiltered RSI/SMA strategy on weekly candles. 77 pairs. 8 years of history. The question: "Should I have held this alt or just held BTC?" (We deliberately excluded XAUT and Wrapped-BTC — reasoning in the report.)
The uncomfortable number
In a classic USD Top-50 sample, about 54% of assets are bear profile — meaning they lost money on Average Buy & Hold over 8 years. Bitter enough.
In the BTC-denominated universe it's 92%.
71 of 77 actively trading alt-pairs lost against BTC over 8 years. These aren't obscure long-tail tokens — these are coins that still trade on Binance Spot today. The structural reality is: if you hold a random alt against BTC, the odds are 92 to 8 in favor of losing.
That view is exactly what most strategy reports don't show, because they're priced in USD.
The second number that changes things
Across this universe a simple, unfiltered RSI/SMA cross strategy on weekly candles beats Average Buy & Hold on 68 of 77 pairs. 88%. On pure bears: 92%. On the rare bull pairs: only 50%.
So the value is not that the strategy outperforms on winners. The value is that it systematically gets out before the long bleed against BTC gets deep. On average it reduces the CAGR loss on the 71 bear pairs by +23.9 percentage points.
What else is in the report
- One token with just 1.5 years of history that passively loses −71% p.a. against BTC — and on which the strategy delivers +43% p.a. with 7 trades. Δ +115 percentage points. Name in the report.
- A tokenized gold proxy on which the strategy fires only 36 trades in 8 years — and still beats B&H by +52 percentage points. Lesson: long stretches in cash are a valid strategy outcome.
- The single coin in the sample on which the strategy underperforms B&H by over 200 percentage points — and why exactly this outlier illustrates what the strategy deliberately doesn't try to do.
- Why the Top-10 outperformers are all bears — and what that says about where the real edge comes from.
- Why the true outperformance Δ is likely substantially higher than the +20 pp the report shows.
The uncomfortable conclusion
Measuring alts in USD shows a softened picture — because USD itself absorbs inflation, money-supply expansion, and bull-run hype. Denominated in BTC, crypto's long tail has been a structural bear market since 2018. The majority of coins lose against the mother-cryptocurrency over long horizons.
A systematic exit strategy isn't a luxury there — it's a direct answer to that reality. RSI/SMA on weekly candles is the simplest available filter — and it does 88% of the work.
The full Quick Insight Report with all 77 pairs, the PAXG gold-proxy deep dive, the bottom-outlier analysis, and the complete asset table is available at:
→ tradingstrategies.work/reports/rsi-sma-1w-crypto-binance-btc-quick-v1
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