This article surveys published research and our own experiments. Documented anomalies are historical patterns, not guarantees. Nothing here is investment advice. Decisions are yours.
Momentum is the tendency of recent winners to keep winning and recent losers to keep losing, over horizons of weeks to months. It is the most durable anomaly in market research, documented across half a century of equity data and, by multiple academic studies, in crypto, where the crowd dynamics behind it run hotter than anywhere else.
The anomaly's pedigree
The modern evidence begins with Jegadeesh and Titman's 1993 study: US stocks ranked by their past six-to-twelve-month returns kept outperforming over the following months, a result so robust that even Eugene Fama, the father of the efficient-market hypothesis, came to describe momentum as the premier anomaly. Two decades later, Moskowitz, Ooi, and Pedersen documented time-series momentum, an asset's own past return predicting its own future return, across dozens of futures markets and asset classes. The distinction matters for everything downstream: cross-sectional momentum ranks assets against each other, time-series momentum asks each asset about itself, and a reader should always know which flavor a claim, or a board column, is making.
The crypto evidence
Crypto did not escape the pattern. Academic work, most prominently Liu and Tsyvinski's study of cryptocurrency risks and returns, documented momentum effects in crypto prices: past strength carried statistically meaningful information about near-term future strength. Our own contribution is smaller and more practical: the transplant experiment took a momentum-breakout engine tuned for equities and ran it, untuned, on this market. The headline was double-edged: the raw geometry translated poorly, but the regime-gated variant, momentum exposure only while the market factor trended, held up, which is itself evidence that the force exists here while the equity implementation does not transfer for free.
Why momentum exists at all
The standing explanations are behavioral, and crypto caricatures each one. Underreaction: information diffuses through a crowd gradually, so prices adjust in trends rather than jumps; in a market where "information" is largely narrative adoption across crypto's sectors, the diffusion is the whole price process. Herding: buying begets buying, and this market's reflexive loops, social feeds, funding flows, and forced short covering compress months of equity herding into weeks. Disposition effects: holders sell winners too early and ride losers too long, slowing the price's travel to fair value in both directions. None of these mechanisms requires anyone to be stupid; they require humans, at scale, under uncertainty, which is the one input this market has in surplus.
The crashes: momentum's exit fee
The anomaly's dark side is documented just as thoroughly: momentum crashes, worked in the academic record by Daniel and Moskowitz, arrive when regimes snap, classically in the violent rebounds off bear-market lows, when everything the strategy is short, or simply not long, rips hardest. Crypto runs the same script with its own props: the washed-out alt that doubles off the floor in a squeeze, the breadth thrust that turns the tape in days. The practical consequence is not to abandon momentum but to respect its regime dependence: the force pays in trending tape, dies in the chop where breakouts fail, and reverses violently at turns. Which is why every serious implementation is really two decisions, what to rank and when to be exposed, the second one being where our transplant found the survivable version, gated by the BTC trend.
What this board publishes, and why
The monitor's momentum columns, 30-day and 90-day price change, are deliberately the plainest members of the family, and the published methodology keeps them that way: time-series readings, published formulas, no weighting, no proprietary sauce. They measure the anomaly's raw material rather than packaging a bet on it, because this site sells measurement rather than advice, and validated strategy is a gate away. The anomaly is real on the evidence above. Whether any specific implementation of it survives costs, cascades, and regime turns is exactly the question the derivation journal has to answer in public before any of it deserves anyone's attention. Decisions are yours.