Over the past 12 months, altcoins have only experienced two brief periods of excess returns: once at the end of 2024 and another during the phased upward cycle of September to October 2025.

Apart from that, Bitcoin (BTC) has consistently maintained its market dominance—leading the rally every time, even during downturns, demonstrating the strongest resilience in the market.

Of course, the market is never short of exceptions, but at this stage, it is not difficult to see that even those long-performing crypto projects are now beginning to face development difficulties.

This phenomenon clearly indicates that a buy-and-hold strategy is not feasible for the vast majority of cryptocurrency portfolios. In fact, this approach has consistently failed in the crypto space over the years.

Altcoins are not without investment value; they do have the potential to generate extremely high returns. However, investors must be extremely cautious in selecting targets and timing their entry—at least waiting until the overall market environment for altcoins is relatively favorable before considering deployment. Generally speaking, in the crypto world, following the trend is far easier to achieve positive returns than blindly bottom-fishing.