Correlation of BTC and altcoins

[highperspective]

I have now several times heard that there is an inverse correlation between BTC and alt coins. But if I look at the graph, I don’t see the same pattern. Also, at the last ‘market-crash’ all coins fell, both BTC and altcoins. What is you observations/research on this?

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[CoinMarketFeed.com]

Our observation is that typically when bitcoin gets pumped, it's at the expense of both fiat and altcoins (people sell altcoins and receive... bitcoins). And it's similar the other way around: if people massively buy altcoins, they mostly spend bitcoin on that transactions.

Of course, there are exceptions (look for the average).

And there are times when the market is going down or up as a whole.

[andyf]

You might investigate the following chart displaying the market dominance and compare it to the market development.: http://www.bitquence.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/bitcoin-market-share.png

It's from this article: https://www.bitquence.com/june-2017-retrospective-cryptocurrency-trends/

Basically, I've observed the same thing as CoinMarketFeed.com and it makes sense, considering the way altcoin<->bitcoin exchanges happen.

[Beefcake]

It isn't as easy as finding a simple pattern, otherwise we would all be fantastically wealthy.  The markets move differently depending on the scenario.  For example right now people may be selling alts for BTC because of the clone in ~10 hours.  Other times it could be a news article on a major outlet increases interest, so new money comes in to the market increasing both BTC and alts.  Sometimes there is a close relationship other times not.  For a while when I first got BTC it seemed that it moved in tandem with LTC.  This no longer seems to be the case.

I would strongly suggest following the markets and paper trading for a while if you plan to use short term strategies.  Otherwise buy a coin you like and forget about it for a few years.

[aleksej996]

It is like correlation between money and stocks, because people buy stocks with money and sell it for money. This means that when one is going up, it is because they are buying it with the other. However, this is not always the case of course, it is just sometimes, but it still happens relatively regularly compared to other market effects.

I guess Bitcoin is like actual money in the cryptoworld and altcoins are stocks, that it why Bitcoin is alone in this compared to the rest of cryptocurrencies bunched up together against it. But obviously sometimes the whole crypto-ecosystem goes up or down compared to fiat and stocks and many other things.

[killerfrost]

Bitcoin is a well developed currency, and it still is essentially an Altcoins. Thus, between Altcoin and Bitcoin there are many similarities, if different, may be that the value of Bitcoin is too high and it is much more popular than other Altcoin so it is chosen as the unit for calculating the value of the digital currency

[AT101ET]

It depends on the time. More often than not you find that most alts follow a similar trend. If BTC rises then most alts rise too. When BTC falls then so do most alts. There are times when this doesn’t apply but that’s kind of the market average.