It is time to consider your holding strategy for the bear market.

It feels odd just writing that in the middle of what is panning out to be a life-changing bull market, but as we approach a year since the last Bitcoin halving, the likely crash and bear market is no longer just a spec on the horizon.

As someone who is balls deep in alts, I've noticed a lot of posts talking about mid to small caps considered to be long term holds in the daily chats. This concerned me a little bit, so I thought it would be good to review a snapshot of the market just before the last crash in order to see which coins have survived and thrived 3 1/2 years later. Spoiler – you generally don't want to be in medium/small cap alts for the bear.

CRYPTOS RANKED BY MARKET CAP 7 JAN 2018 https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/20180107/

For anyone that wasn't investing in 2018, take a look at the table linked above, also flick on to page 2 to see the top 200 cryptos of that time too. I would wager you haven't heard of a large proportion of them. That should be a huge warning straight away. A lot of your mid-small cap alts are not long term holds.

You'll see from the above link that most of the top ten cryptos are still there or thereabouts. Bitcoin, Eth, Litcoin, Ripple all big players with significant time in the game, plus a number of forks and a few new tech blockchains such as Ada. Many of the 2017 top ten are still there due to having first mover advantage, having built up a network effect.

However as you move out of the top 10 things start to change. Most of the top 20 are still live projects but many have lost ranking significantly. The top 50 have a few success stories such as VET and BNB, but the majority are down in ranking now with some dead projects.

Out of the top 50 the number cryptos that are either massively down in rankings or have failed completely increase significantly, and this trend keeps increasing out of the top 100. The smaller the cap, the higher the risk it is now down, or dead.

There's a lesson to heed here. Mid-small cap alts are great for the bullrun, especially the latter stages. But unless your alt has made a significant move towards the top 20 by the end of the run, there's an extreme risk you may end up losing money if you choose to hold it through a crash and extended bear market. Sure you might get lucky with LTO, 1Inch, FTM or MANA, but the odds are against you.

If you plan to stay in crypto beyond this bullrun, by far the safest bet is to convert your small to mid cap alts to a top 10 ( or maybe top 20) coin, with the vast majority of your holdings in BTC/ETHstablecoins for the bear.

Crypto moves fast, and the alt coin sectors that will boom in 2024/25 will be very different to those booming now. Far better to review the alt landscape around the time of ohe next Bitcoin halving, see which projects have survived and gained momentum, then start reinvesting in small-mid caps.

There are still huge gains to be had (5,000-20,000% in a year from the halving), so why risk holding for two years in a brutal bear market.

Hope this might help a few people down the line, good luck to you all!