This is an explainer of a participation metric, including the one this site computes daily. It predicts nothing. Nothing here is investment advice. Decisions are yours.
Market breadth measures how many assets participate in a move rather than how far the headline index travels: the share of a universe above its own trend line, advancing on the day, or making new highs. A market where three majors rise while eighty alts bleed and one where the whole board climbs can print identical headline returns, and breadth is the number that tells them apart.
The standard measurements
Breadth is a family of ratios over a defined universe, and how that universe is defined matters as much as the formula, so our universe rules are published in full. The workhorse: the percentage of assets trading above their own moving average, with the 50-day the common horizon, reading participation in the medium trend. Cousins: advance-decline counts (how many rose today), new-high and new-low counts over a window, and the share outperforming the reference asset, the version that turns alt season from a mood into a measurement. All are computable from public prices with published formulas, which is why breadth is one of the few crypto metrics that cannot be manufactured by a venue or a marketing department: it is arithmetic over the whole board, and the whole board is public.
Why breadth matters doubly here
In equities breadth is a useful nuance. In crypto it is closer to essential, for one structural reason: the headline of this market is a handful of majors, and the one-factor correlation regime means BTC's own strength can carry the visible market while the rest of the board quietly dies underneath. Headline-watchers cannot see that state; breadth is that state, measured. It is also the honest divergence detector in both directions: majors grinding up on collapsing breadth describes the 2024-2025 era of BTC dominance, precisely the tape where alt exposure bled against a rising market, while broad participation confirms that strength is a market phenomenon rather than an index artifact.
The classic readings
Three configurations carry most of breadth's information. Confirmation: rising prices with rising breadth, the boring healthy state. Negative divergence: rising headline prices over deteriorating breadth, historically the anteroom of trouble, because a market held up by fewer and fewer names has fewer and fewer reasons to stay up; this is the state the breadth floor in our regime dial's methodology exists to catch, and RISK-OFF triggers on breadth below 25% regardless of what BTC itself is doing. And the breadth thrust: from a washed-out floor, the share of assets reclaiming their trend lines jumping broadly and fast, historically among the more reliable early marks of regime turns, in crypto as in equities, because turns built on wide participation have the recruitment a durable trend requires. Thrusts are rare, which is their value; most bounces recruit narrowly and fail.
How our board computes it
The dial's breadth input is deliberately the plainest version: the percentage of the monitor's top-100 universe closing above its own 50-day average, computed daily from closed bars, thresholds fixed at 40% and 25% for the dial's state logic, universe membership published, every input recomputable against the monitor's published methodology. No smoothing, no proprietary weighting, no discretion. The reading appears alongside its raw value rather than as a verdict alone, so a reader can watch the number approach a threshold instead of being surprised by a state flip.
Honest limits
Four, stated plainly. Universe dependency: breadth over the top 100 liquid assets describes the market that matters for most readers, and says nothing about the ten-thousand-token long tail, a scoping choice, published as such. Equal-weight arithmetic: every asset counts once, so breadth deliberately ignores size, which is its point and its bias. Noise at the margin: thin alts oscillate around their averages, which is why the dial uses bands rather than a single line, and why day-to-day breadth wiggle means little against week-scale direction. And lag at turns: breadth built on 50-day averages inherits the same lag as every trend measure in this library; it will confirm regimes, not predict them. Breadth answers one question with unusual honesty, who is actually participating, and in a market this narrative-driven, that one honest answer earns its place on the board. Decisions are yours.