Market Regimes
The market's "weather" — and the strategy that runs in each condition.
The three regimes
| Regime | What it looks like | Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Sideways | Price oscillates in a range, repeatedly touching the upper and lower edges. No sustained trend. | Grid bots — buy low / sell high inside the range. |
| Upward | Sustained rising trend. Higher highs and higher lows; coins climbing even during pullbacks. | Rising-coin futures — leveraged longs on coins meeting the rising-coin criteria. |
| Downward | Sustained falling trend. Lower highs and lower lows; BTC/ETH drawdowns drag the market. | Conservative + Risk-Taker futures — buying deeply oversold coins ahead of rebounds. |
Why regime matters more than signals
- RSI 30 in a downtrend can keep falling — "oversold" can stay oversold for weeks.
- A range breakout kills a grid bot instantly — but it is exactly what a trend-following futures strategy wants.
- Grid profits come from oscillation; a trending market is hostile to grids because price escapes the range.
Indicators mean different things in different regimes. Regime is the context; scanner signals are the opportunity. A great setup in the wrong regime is a losing trade.
How the regime is detected
Blind Monkeys blends market-level signals: BTC/ETH price behavior (trending vs. range-bound, drawdown depth), momentum and volatility across the market, and macro sentiment including the Fear & Greed Index, VIX, and Treasury yields. Conditions transition gradually, so the classification is continuously re-evaluated and strategies switch when the regime changes.
The volatility dimension
Traditional analysis also splits each regime by volatility: a calm uptrend ("bull grind") behaves very differently from a high-volatility melt-up, and a slow bear bleed differs from a crash. Blind Monkeys consolidates these into three actionable regimes, but high-volatility variants matter for risk settings — a crash can blow through a stop-loss faster than expected, which is why daily caps and stop-losses exist.