How Sightglass works

What each number means, how it is calculated, and what it cannot tell you.

Sightglass reads a coin and describes what has happened. It does not score coins, predict prices or say buy or sell. Every figure below comes from one source and one fixed calculation, so you can check it yourself.

Data

• Source: Binance spot market, the coin's USDT pair, daily candles.
• Window: up to five years, or the coin's full Binance history if it is shorter.
• Days are UTC days. The latest candle is the day still in progress, so today's figures move until 00:00 UTC.
• Results are cached for a few minutes.

The numbers

Price change

The current price against the previous daily close (UTC). It is not a rolling 24-hour change, so it can differ from what an exchange shows.

This move

Today's change divided by the coin's average absolute daily change over the last 30 days. Below 0.6× is described as calm, above 1.8× as unusually active.

Beta versus Bitcoin

The slope from regressing the coin's daily returns on Bitcoin's daily returns over their shared history in the window. A beta of 1.4 means the coin moved about 1.4% on average, in the same direction, on days Bitcoin moved 1%. It is an average over years; it can be very different in any single week.

Moves with

The two highest 90-day correlations of daily returns, measured against a fixed set of 15 large coins. Correlation shows that two coins moved together, not why.

Historical position

The share of days in the window that closed below today's price. The 30th percentile means the price was lower than today on 30% of those days. It says nothing about whether a coin is cheap or expensive.

Volatility

The standard deviation of the last 90 daily returns, annualised by multiplying by the square root of 365. The comparison with Bitcoin uses the same 90 days.

Worst drawdown

The largest fall from an earlier peak to a later low inside the window, with the date of the low. The reason shown is matched by date against a short list of market-wide events (for example the March 2020 crash, Luna/UST and FTX). If the date matches none of them, Sightglass says so instead of guessing.

Which coins get a page

You can search any coin with a USDT pair on Binance. The coin list and search engines only include crypto assets with at least one year of Binance history. Stablecoins, tokenised stocks and gold-backed tokens are left out, because these measures say little about them.

Limits

• One exchange. Prices and history on other venues can differ, and coins not listed on Binance are not covered.
• Daily data. Moves inside a day are not visible here.
• A coin's history starts at its Binance listing, so a newer coin has a shorter window and a shallower-looking record.
• All of this describes the past. None of it is a forecast, and none of it is investment advice.

Money

Sightglass is free and carries no ads, sponsored coins or affiliate links. A paid tier for extra depth is planned; the risk figures on this page will stay free.

What is recorded when you visit

• The server keeps a simple count of page views and searched symbols, with the time and the site you arrived from. It does not store IP addresses and sets no cookies.
• "Recently viewed" is saved only in your own browser.
• Pages load fonts from Google Fonts and coin logos from jsDelivr; those services receive a normal web request from your browser.