🔍 How I decide where to buy altcoins

valuable weekly insights

Oct 22, 2026

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔍 How I decide where to buy altcoins

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔍 How I decide where to buy altcoins

If we’re talking about BTC, buying at $81,000 instead of $87,000 during a bull market won’t necessarily make a big difference in the long run.

But altcoins are significantly more volatile than BTC.

The timing of your altcoin buys matters, because your profit can be significantly higher if you buy an altcoin at $0.2 instead of $0.27, for example.

In today’s newsletter, I want to share how I decide which price levels to buy altcoins at.

I’ll take the NEAR chart as an example to explain my strategy:

For tokens that have been live for at least 1-2 years, I generally focus on the daily and weekly timeframes when analyzing their charts.

In the chart above, I marked the key price levels (support zones) where NEAR has historically struggled to break above or below with a white line.

Identifying these levels is pretty straightforward. You just need to look for the price levels that have been tested multiple times. I highlighted in yellow the areas where NEAR struggled to break through the $3.526 and $4.562 price levels.

These are the support and resistance levels I would pay the most attention to.

Next, what I usually do is compare BTC’s recent performance with the performance of the token I want to buy. (For this example, the token is NEAR)

CoinGecko has a useful “Compare” feature where you can add multiple tokens.

I added BTC and NEAR and got the 7-day chart below.

As you can see above, NEAR has outperformed BTC over the past 7 days, showing strong relative strength. Relative strength to BTC is exactly what I want to see before buying an altcoin, as it could signal that its local bottom is near.

Given this, if I want to increase my NEAR exposure, my next move would be to set a buy order for NEAR just above its nearest support level.

As shown at the beginning of this issue, that level is $4.562, marked with a white line.

The reason is that if NEAR drops back to $4.562, there’s a decent chance, based on the past price action, that this will be the local bottom, giving me a very good entry price.

And that’s essentially my strategy for buying altcoins.

To sum it up, this is what it involves:

Mark the key support levels of the token I want to buy on the daily chart
Check how the token has performed relative to BTC over the past week
If, and only if, that token has recently held up relatively well compared to BTC, I will place a buy order just a bit above its closest support level

If BTC is down 6% in a week and the altcoin I want to buy is down 10%, I think it’s still fine to place buy orders for it at the next key support level.

But to give another example, if BTC is down 6% and the altcoin I want to buy is down 18%, I usually don’t think it’s a good idea to set buy orders for it yet, as its recent weakness could indicate it still has a lot of room to fall before it bottoms.

That’s how I approach buying altcoins, and this has worked well for me in the past.

With that said, I hope you found this guide helpful!

Hopefully, the market recovers soon, and we’ll be talking only about taking profits rather than buying the dip.