The alt season isn’t arriving because there isn’t enough profit to move

How rotation actually works

So the right question isn’t “is bitcoin high?” but “has bitcoin produced enough profit to create the liquidity a rotation needs?”. They are two different questions and they lead to two different answers, and it is why the wait for the alt season has lasted months while bitcoin’s price does whatever it likes.

The most direct way to look at it is to count how many coins are beating bitcoin. In our archive, on the day I write, over the previous ninety days it is 36 out of 308: 12 percent. In a real rotation that number sits on the other side of half.

The comparison with the cycle everyone cites

Today bitcoin is at $90,395, about 31 percent above the previous cycle’s peak. It is a new high, but it hasn’t produced the same reservoir: whoever bought in 2021–2022 is only just back to even, and whoever bought in 2023 has gained without the multiples that justify moving capital into riskier things.

Working the sum backwards, to reach conditions comparable to 2020 bitcoin would have to be between a hundred and fifty and a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. That isn’t a price forecast: it is the size of the reservoir it would take for the rotation to have any fuel.

What dominance and the indexes say

For comparison: during the 2021 alt season that same share fell from seventy to thirty-nine percent. We are seeing nothing comparable, and the difference isn’t one of intensity — it is one of kind.

The index that tries to measure the alt season with a single figure touched eighty-seven at the start of December, above the seventy-five threshold that usually declares one open, and went straight back toward fifty. That shape — a spike and a return — is the signature of false starts, not of beginnings.

Over recent months Bitcoin’s share of the market’s total value has swung between 54 and 61.5 percent. During the 2021 alt season that same share had fallen from 70 to 39 percent. The index that measures the alt season touched 87 at the start of December and went back toward 50.

The channel that stays shut

Until ethereum shows relative strength against bitcoin, a rotation into the smaller coins is unlikely: the intermediate step would be missing. Whoever buys the small ones directly is betting that capital skips the channel, which in previous cycles has never happened.

This cycle, though, has two new elements that could change the rules. The first is the bitcoin ETFs: they opened an entry channel for institutional capital that by mandate stays on bitcoin and will never rotate — so the reservoir is smaller than the market value suggests. The second is the multiplication of projects: in 2020 liquidity concentrated on a few hundred names, today it disperses across thousands, and the same amount of money produces far smaller moves.

How I position, and what would change my mind

The commonest mistake, and the most expensive, is anticipating: whoever buys altcoins too early stays behind bitcoin for months, and loses capital in relative terms even when the prices in dollars are rising. It is a loss you don’t see in the portfolio in euros and see perfectly well in the comparison.

The signals that would change my mind are three, and all three are measurable: bitcoin’s share falling continuously rather than in jerks, the ethereum-to-bitcoin ratio genuinely turning, and the share of coins beating bitcoin passing steadily above half. While they are where they are today, the position stays as it is.

The three signs of rotation: Bitcoin’s share of the market’s total value falling continuously and not in jerks; the ratio between Ethereum and Bitcoin reversing its multi-year trend; the share of coins beating Bitcoin over ninety days steadily above half.