Crypto Market Breadth Report

MarketVector Crypto Heat Index

The MarketVector Crypto Heat Index is a composite breadth indicator that quantifies market participation across the digital asset universe on a normalized scale from 0 to 1. Unlike sentiment tools that incorporate surveys, social media activity, or Google Trends data, the index is constructed exclusively from objective price and breadth data, making it verifiable, replicable, and suitable for systematic allocation frameworks.

The index aggregates four equally weighted sub-indicators, each capturing a distinct dimension of market health. The Percentage of Top 100 Assets Above the 200-Day Moving Average measures the share of constituents maintaining a long-term uptrend, reflecting broad structural confidence. The Altcoin Season Indicator measures the breadth of rotation into altcoins relative to Bitcoin over a rolling 90-day period, signaling speculative risk appetite when smaller assets begin to outperform at scale. The Net New 90-Day Highs/Lows tracks the rolling 30-day delta of new highs minus new lows across all MVDA 100 constituents, indicating whether an uptrend is underpinned by expanding leadership or a downtrend is reinforced by widening weakness. The Advance/Decline Line Slope examines the short-term slope of advancing versus declining assets in the top 50 MVDA coins over a rolling 30-day window, giving a pulse on whether gains are broadly shared or concentrated in a handful of names. Each component is mapped to a common 0–1 scale using robust percentile normalization based on the 5th and 95th historical percentiles to reduce outlier distortion, then combined into a single equally weighted daily composite.

The index delineates three sentiment zones that carry direct allocation meaning. A reading below 0.25 defines the Capitulation zone, indicating a state of extreme breadth compression where historical forward returns have been most favorable. Readings between 0.25 and 0.75 constitute the Neutral zone, reflecting normal cyclical conditions. Values above 0.75 define the Overheating zone, consistent with late-cycle breadth expansion and elevated drawdown risk.

The index embeds systematic rebalancing signals directly into its construction. An Add Exposure signal requires two conditions to be met simultaneously: the index must be below the 0.25 threshold and its 20-day SMA must cross above the 50-day SMA, ensuring that entry points are concentrated in periods of extreme pessimism showing early signs of trend reversal. A De-Risk signal is triggered when the index exceeds the 0.75 threshold and its 20-day SMA crosses below the 50-day SMA. The framework is designed for long-duration allocators seeking to capture major bull and bear market cycles, not for short-term trading.

Crypto Rotation Index (CRI): High-Low Logic Index

The Crypto Rotation Index (CRI) is a breadth coherence indicator adapted from Norman Fosback’s High-Low Logic Index, originally developed for US equity markets in the 1970s. The traditional formulation identified a logical contradiction in market behavior: healthy bull market breadth should be characterized by an abundance of new highs and few new lows, not by simultaneous high readings in both. The index therefore takes the minimum of the new-highs ratio and the new-lows ratio, penalizing environments in which the market exhibits internally contradictory breadth. A low reading (few new lows and many new highs, or vice versa) is consistent with a coherent trend; a high reading signals internal fragmentation.

For the CRI, this construct is adapted to the digital asset universe using the MVDA constituent set on rolling 90-day lookback windows. Daily new-highs and new-lows counts are expressed as percentages of the total universe. The net new highs/lows ratio is then smoothed using a 14-day exponential moving average to reduce the signal noise inherent in a relatively small-capitalization universe subject to idiosyncratic volatility. The EMA output is the primary charted series.

The idea is simple: in a healthy market, most coins should move in the same direction. In a strong bull market, many coins make new highs and very few make new lows. In a bear market, many coins make new lows and few make new highs. When both new highs and new lows are elevated at the same time, the market is behaving “illogically.” This signals internal divergence and instability, which often occurs near major market turning points.

Crypto Cycle Top Finder

The Crypto Cycle Top Finder is a regime classification framework built on a breadth-at-peak metric. It monitors the percentage of MVDA Top-100 constituents trading above their own 90-day moving average at the precise moment the MVDA index itself sets a new all-time high. The core insight is that the quality of a market peak, specifically its forward-return distribution and drawdown severity, is materially conditioned on how broad the underlying participation is when that peak is established.

Historical episodes are classified into three zones based on breadth at the ATH moment. Full Steam episodes (breadth above 90%) are characterized by near-universal constituent participation, historically associated with the strongest subsequent rebounds and the highest probability of continued upside. Fading Thrust episodes (breadth between 75% and 90%) reflect a market reaching a new high with declining internal participation, a warning signal consistent with a maturing cycle. Breakdown episodes (breadth below 75%) indicate that the index ATH was set by a small minority of constituents while the majority of the universe was already in drawdown, which is historically the most bearish forward-return classification, associated with the deepest subsequent corrections.

When the MVDA index is not at an all-time high, the framework reports OFF PEAK status, tracking the percentage distance from the prior ATH and the number of elapsed days. Episode-level statistics, including duration, peak breadth, and subsequent forward returns at 30, 60, 90, and 180 days, are compiled across all catalogued cycles since 2017 to provide a conditioning framework for current market regime assessment.

Crypto Breadth Thrust

The Crypto Breadth Thrust indicator is adapted from Martin Zweig’s original Breadth Thrust concept, which identified rare but historically reliable momentum events in US equity markets during which a sharp reversal in broad market participation, shifting from deeply oversold to broadly overbought in a compressed time window, signaling the initiation of powerful new bull phases. The adaptation to digital assets replaces the NYSE advance/decline mechanics with an MVDA constituent breadth measure based on the percentage of coins trading above a short-term threshold.

The signal mechanism operates in two sequential stages. The system enters an armed state when breadth drops below 20%, indicating that fewer than one in five constituents is in a near-term uptrend, a level consistent with maximum pessimism and breadth compression. Once armed, a Breadth Thrust signal fires if breadth subsequently surges above 80% within a 10-day window, confirming that the market has shifted rapidly from near-universal selling to near-universal buying. This two-condition structure is designed to filter out minor recoveries and require the kind of sharp, broad-based reversal that historically precedes sustained upside regimes.

Since 2017, the MVDA universe has generated five Breadth Thrust signals. Across all five, the 60-day and 90-day forward return hit rates are 100%, with average MVDA returns of +30.0% and +43.3% at those horizons respectively. The rarity of the signal, averaging fewer than one per year, and the consistency of the subsequent return profile make it one of the highest-conviction indicators in the breadth framework. The current report monitors the proximity of breadth to the arming threshold and tracks progress toward potential signal conditions in real time.

Crypto Regime Indicator

The Crypto Regime Indicator classifies every trading session into one of four discrete market regimes by applying dual slow-trend MACD signals to two orthogonal series: BTC dominance (BTC.D), which measures Bitcoin’s share of total crypto market capitalization, and the MarketVector Digital Assets Small-Cap Index (MVDASC), which proxies the performance of altcoin risk appetite. Both signals are computed as EMA(fast) minus EMA(slow) and then normalized relative to a rolling ATR. Observations whose |MACD| falls within a deadband of k×ATR are treated as ambiguous and forward-filled from the last directional reading, suppressing noise-driven regime flips.

The four regimes follow from the joint sign of the two filtered signals. Regime 1 — Broad Rally, BTC Leads occurs when both BTC dominance and MVDASC are trending up: Bitcoin is appreciating and drawing capital into the asset class, and small-cap alts are participating. Regime 2 — Defensive Bitcoin occurs when BTC dominance is rising but MVDASC is falling: capital is concentrating into Bitcoin at the expense of altcoins, a defensive or risk-off rotation within crypto. Regime 3 — Altseason occurs when BTC dominance is falling and MVDASC is rising: altcoins are outperforming Bitcoin, indicating broad speculative risk appetite. Regime 4 — Broad Bear occurs when both series are in downtrend: capital is leaving the crypto ecosystem entirely.

Signal parameters are fixed at DOM_FAST = 30, DOM_SLOW = 200 for BTC dominance and SIG_FAST = 30, SIG_SLOW = 150 for MVDASC, with a deadband threshold k = 0.25. These parameters are locked to match the backtest calibration and are not adjusted for individual reports. The current regime, its duration in days, lifetime frequency across the full sample, and the full regime timeline since 2018 are displayed in the report.

Trend Lens — Supertrend Module

The Trend Lens section applies the Supertrend indicator across every constituent of the MVDA universe to generate a daily cross-sectional view of trend participation. Supertrend is a trailing stop-and-reverse system that combines average true range (ATR) with a fixed multiplier to define adaptive support and resistance bands around the price series. When the closing price is above the upper band the asset is classified as in an uptrend; when it is below the lower band the asset is classified as in a downtrend. The parameters used in this report are an ATR window of 10 days and a multiplier of 3.0, consistent across all constituents.

The section is organized into five tabs. The MVDA Snapshot tab shows each constituent mapped onto a heatmap by its current Supertrend state and sector classification, giving an instant cross-sectional picture of trend breadth. The Participation tab plots the time-series of the percentage of constituents in uptrend, which is analogous to a percentage-above-moving-average breadth measure but uses the adaptive Supertrend threshold rather than a fixed lookback. The Leadership tab groups constituents into cohorts based on whether they are in an uptrend, a downtrend, or recently flipped, and shows the size and market-cap weight of each cohort. The Macro tab overlays the breadth time-series against cross-asset indicators such as traditional equity breadth or DXY to provide macro context for the crypto trend environment. The History tab shows a rolling record of past Supertrend readings for a selected subset of major assets.