Building an Equal-Weight Altcoin Index Against Bitcoin

Summary

This document describes a simple altcoin price index denominated in Bitcoin, initialized at a base value of 1000 on February 22, 2018. It retrieves Binance ticker prices, selects symbols ending in BTC, and compares each eligible coin’s current price with its stored initial price. The index is the base value multiplied by the arithmetic mean of those price ratios.

The script persists each coin’s first observed price and adds newly encountered BTC pairs to the set used for later calculations. It logs the index hourly. This produces an equal-weight average of price changes for the included coins, rather than a market-cap-weighted measure. The document provides implementation details but no performance analysis or validation. Results depend on the exchange’s available pairs and the time each coin is first recorded; new listings are added at their then-current price, so the membership and reference points can change over time. It also gives no treatment of delistings, missing data, fees, or index rebalancing.

Key ideas

• The index expresses altcoin prices in BTC and starts from a base level of 1000.
• Each included coin contributes equally through its current-to-initial price ratio.
• Initial prices are stored persistently, and newly observed BTC pairs are added to the index.
• The script records the index hourly but provides no backtest or performance evidence.

Tags

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.