The universality and structural bull market of the crypto market

Readers often ask in the message area: Will there be a market for altcoins next?

I have responded to this question many times. I think it is difficult to see a general altcoin bull market. A few valuable projects and value coins may still restart the market with the rise of the bull market.

This view is just my own intuitive feeling. There is not much experience to follow, nor is there much historical data to support it.

But recently, after reading the investment experience of a senior, I have a clearer understanding of the above intuitive feeling.

This senior is a well-known investor on Xueqiu, nicknamed "Retail Investor B". He recorded his investment experience in A shares from 2013 to 2023 in real time on Xueqiu, and then cancelled his account on December 31, 2023, and completely "disappeared" in cyberspace.

He is the first generation of investors in A-shares. He started investing in A-shares in 1991 and experienced various historical changes of A-shares and recorded various growth stages of A-shares.

Although he cancelled his account, fortunately, many careful netizens on Xueqiu recorded all his remarks in detail and compiled them into a book, which gave me the opportunity to read that period of history and opened my eyes.

In his narrative, he vividly described the universal bull market and structural bull market of A-shares.

When A-shares were just established, there were only dozens or hundreds of listed stocks.

At that time, no matter what stocks you bought, no matter how high the price was, no matter how badly they fell in the subsequent bear market, as long as the next bull market came, they could all be untied.

At that time, A-shares were a market where anyone who was brave enough to rush in could get rich. Because there were too few stocks that could be hyped, when a bull market came and the leading stocks were hyped too high, new players could only buy and dare to buy those cheap stocks. So for a period of time, A-shares were a market where as long as you could hold on to the stocks, even if you bought junk stocks, you could eventually turn around and even make money.

At that time, every bull market that A-shares encountered was what we call a universal bull market.

Is this phenomenon exactly the same as what we saw in the crypto ecosystem in the early years?

It’s just that the retail investors who rushed into the A-shares back then have become the retail investors who are rushing into the crypto ecosystem today---the flowers are similar every year, but the people are different every year.

However, after 2000, especially after 2010, when the volume of A-shares became larger and larger, and the total market value reached 10 trillion or even tens of trillions, it became increasingly difficult for general social funds, even institutional funds, to form a universal bull market. Even before the stock market crash in 2015, even if the whole society used financing and allocation methods, it was difficult to form a situation where junk stocks rose generally.

Under this circumstance, A-shares have almost never seen a general bull market, but only a structural bull market---only individual sectors have risen, while many unpopular sectors have remained flat.

This phenomenon is not only in A-shares, but also in Hong Kong stocks and US stocks. Especially in US stocks, only a few leading high-performing technology stocks have truly achieved huge gains in the long bull market in these years, while quite a few stocks are in a sideways situation.

Is this particularly similar to the situation we see in the crypto ecosystem today?

In this round of market conditions, if we exclude all kinds of crazy meme coins and look at the old coins in the past, is it true that except for a very small number of project tokens that are still under construction and have value support and have a certain increase, most of them are basically in a flat situation?

Following this line of thought, how many of the newly emerged tokens in this round of market will have the hope of rising again in the future after this round of bubble bursts?

I believe the answer is self-evident.

So we should abandon the fantasy that there is still a general copycat season, carefully examine the tokens we currently hold, throw away or replace the tokens that we think are uncertain and have no future, and try to streamline and simplify as much as possible.

In the future, when we are ready to make a move, especially when we are ready to make a heavy investment, we must be cautious and cautious.