Alpha Navigator: Quest for Alpha [March 2025]

Asset performance was mixed. Crypto, Equities and Fixed Income decreased, while Real Assets’ performance was mixed. In March, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to establish a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile.

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Executive Summary

• Asset performance was mixed. Crypto, Equities and Fixed Income decreased, while Real Assets’ performance was mixed.

• The US Federal Reserve kept interest rates unchanged at 4.25% to 4.50%, in line with expectations, and still sees two rate cuts ahead in 2025. It currently sees the US economy increasing 1.7% in 2025 (down 0.4% compared to the previous estimate in December), while core inflation is expected to grow 2.8% annually (up 0.3% from the previous estimate). US President Donald Trump announced “reciprocal tariff” rates that will impact its trading partners. This includes a 10% baseline tariff for countries that export to the US, while some countries will face higher tariffs.

• Key macro events in April include interest rate decisions from Eurozone, Canada, China, and New Zealand, as well as Q1 GDP announcements from China, the EU, and US.

• BTC’s 1-month performance correlation with Gold decreased and turned negative with some equity indices, including S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100.

• US spot BTC ETFs saw $680 million in net outflows in March. US President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order to establish a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a Digital Asset Stockpile, with no immediate planned purchases of bitcoin. Trump also posted on his Truth Social platform that the crypto reserve would include XRP, SOL, and ADA. Additionally, the President announced multiple tariff updates in the month.

• Market-Neutral Pair Trader hunts for strongly correlated tokens and potential market-neutral pair trades. ARB/OP (0.89) showed the strongest price correlation, followed by DOT/ATOM (0.86) and DOT/POL (0.85).

• For the BTC vs. ETH pair, the price ratio (BTC price divided by ETH price) further increased beyond the 2-standard deviation (SD) level in March.

• Our style-factor screens track momentum, value, growth, and risk for the Layer-1 and Layer-2, DeFi, Gaming, and NFT categories. Below is the screen for selected top crypto tokens by market cap in the Layer-1 and Layer-2 category. Most L1 and L2 tokens dropped, except for CRO (+38.1%), TON (+17.1%), ADA (+4.1%) and BNB (+2.4%). 

• Our events section shows recent and upcoming events for selected tokens, as well as important macroeconomic events.

Read the full Alpha Navigator report: Alpha Navigator: Quest for Alpha [March 2025]

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Research & Insights Team

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