How Ballast works
When a coin you hold moves, Ballast tells you whether it matters. This page is the machinery behind that answer, in plain English.
The question every page answers
Every coin page leads with the day's move and then answers it: does it matter? A move earns a “Yes” for a reason we can point to: it crossed the worry line, it ran far outside the coin's own normal day, or the standing read already says step back. Most days the honest answer is “Not really,” and we say that instead of inventing drama.
The standing read
Under the day's answer sits the standing read: Sit tight, Ease off a bit, or Lighten up. It is the same read on the dashboard and the coin page, taken from months of daily history, and it moves slowly on purpose.
The calm is deliberate, and it is tested. We ran the classic buy-and-sell signals across major coins and ten years of history; almost none of them beat doing nothing. So Ballast doesn't nudge you to act on every twitch. It saves its voice for the conditions where outcomes have historically turned ugly, and defaults to “sit tight” the rest of the time.
The three lines
Each coin page maps up to three prices, and they don't carry equal weight:
- The worry line. The one with teeth. In our testing, after a daily close below it, the next two months leaned lower than usual. A close below it flips the day's answer to “Yes” on the spot.
- Getting pricey (the ceiling). Where the coin stalled before. Closing above it is context worth knowing, not a signal to chase.
- Calmer entry (the floor). The nearest price the coin turned at before. Orientation, so you always know where price stands. Our testing found floors like this hold their first test only about a third of the time, so we never promise one will hold.
The lines trigger on the daily close, never on a wick during the day. And they change the day's answer, not the standing read: that only moves when the trend and stretch behind it move.
Live price, once-a-day read
The price at the top of every page is live, so a number you glance at is never stale. Everything judged (the answer, the read, the lines) is taken once a day at the daily close (8:00 PM ET, when crypto's trading day rolls over), and holds until the next one. A full day's close cuts through the minute-to-minute noise, and it keeps the words and the chart telling the same story all day.
How we read a coin
Every read is built from standard technical analysis, the same formulas charting tools like TradingView use, calculated the conventional way. The math does the analyzing; plain-English templates only turn the finished numbers into a sentence. Every number in the words is the exact number drawn on the chart.
- Trend. Where price sits against its 20-day, 50-day, and 200-day averages. Moving averages lag, so a separate strength gauge (ADX) has to confirm a trend is actually live before we call it one.
- Momentum. RSI, a 0-to-100 gauge of how stretched a recent move is. We don't use the textbook “70 is hot”; we compare today's reading to how this coin's own RSI has behaved over its past year, so a calm coin and a wild one aren't held to the same line.
- Overextension. How far price has pushed outside its normal band (Bollinger %B), calibrated to this coin's own history the same way momentum is.
- A normal day, for this coin. How hard the coin typically swings. That yardstick is what lets us call a move “far outside normal” instead of guessing.
- Versus Bitcoin. How closely it tracks Bitcoin (correlation) and how much harder it swings (beta), over the last 90 days. That's how we tell whether a move was the coin itself or just the whole market.
Honest by design
- We measure against the past, never the future. A coin's “normal range” is built only from data that existed at the time, so nothing is quietly fit with hindsight.
- One weird week can't poison a read. Each coin's own thresholds are pulled partway toward a broad, multi-coin baseline and only trusted once it has about a year of clean readings.
- Oversold is not automatically “buy.” We tested that too: buying the classic “beaten down” moments did worse than doing nothing. We report the condition and skip the green light.
- A coin we can't read gets no answer. If a coin lacks the size, volume, or history to read honestly, the page says “Can't say yet” instead of pretending. We'd rather say nothing than guess.
- The chart matches the words, once a day. The lines on the chart and the numbers in the note are the exact same numbers, refreshed once a day. Nothing to babysit.
Where the numbers come from
Prices, trading volume, and market caps come from CoinGecko, a widely used market-data source. We pull each coin's daily history and read from that stored history, so a weird five-minute spike never swings your read.
What Ballast is not
Not advice. It's information. You make the call.
Not a price target. We don't claim to know what a coin is “worth.”
Not a money-making signal. Whether this kind of analysis predicts returns is openly debated, and we don't claim it does. The point is awareness, so you're not flying blind.
Information, not advice.