The 8th Rule, Pointed at 500 Alts
For nearly six months the 8th Rule has done one job .. keep me on the right side of Bitcoin. It was built for BTC, tuned for ETH and gold, and stress-tested against the SPX. Now I’ve pointed it at the entire altcoin market and I’m letting it run on its own, every single night.
Every night around 8:30 PM ET my server pulls the top 500 altcoins by market cap, runs every single one of them through a Python port of the 8th Rule across four different archetype tunings built for alts and memes, and surfaces the handful that just flipped from BEAR (0%) into a fresh entry on the most recent closed daily bar. Not coins already sitting in an uptrend. Coins that transitioned today. Either a PROBE (a 25% toe-in-the-water) or a FULL (send it).
That’s the whole game: catch the trend signal the day it happens, in the high-beta corner of the market where the asymmetric moves actually live. Same engine logic you already trust on Bitcoin .. just turned loose on the junk drawer.
The scanner is in the members area, and it’s free for paid subscribers along with the rest of the toolkit (MRE, the 8th Rule for BTC/ETH/Gold, US factor bets). Open the dashboard .. or subscribe on Substack if you’re not in yet.
What Lands in the Report, Every Night
The scanner is deterministic. Same job, same time, same output schema. Here is what you open the next morning:
| Section | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Scan stats | How many coins scanned, total transitions, active alerts vs auto-rejected. The 30-second read. |
| Active alerts | Coins that flipped BEAR→FULL or BEAR→PROBE and survived the bullish filter. The shortlist. |
| Auto-rejected | Same transitions, but failed the filter .. low volume, sky-high annualized vol, blacklisted. Reasons spelled out. Manual review only. |
| Per-coin archetype analysis | For every transition candidate, all four archetypes (champion / defender / meme_specialist / mature_specialist) backtested on the coin’s full history. ★ marks the historical best fit. Today’s signal is shown per archetype, color-coded. |
| Conviction score | How many of the four archetypes agree on the entry. 1/4 FULL is one thing; 3/4 FULL is another. |
| Archetype settings | The exact TradingView inputs for each archetype, ready to copy. Built-in copy buttons so you don’t mistype a single decimal. |
| 7-day archive | Click any of the last seven dates to load that run. Useful for back-checking a signal you slept through. |
Some nights the active list is empty. That’s by design .. the filter is intentionally strict. Volume, volatility, and a few blacklists do most of the work. On the days something does pass, it’s worth a look. On the days it doesn’t, you go to bed.
Same Engine. Different Tunings.
The engine is the same 8th Rule indicator that’s already free on TradingView .. Gaussian-filtered Hull moving average for the trend, ATR-based confirmation for the trigger, VATS for the regime gate. Two systems in one, dynamic position sizing built in.
The wrinkle here is four tunings, each optimised against a different slice of historical alt data:
| Archetype | Where it shines |
|---|---|
| champion | The current default. Balanced across the dataset .. my baseline for live scanning. |
| defender | Best mean Calmar across the set .. risk-efficient. Slower confirmations, fewer fakeouts. |
| meme_specialist | Tuned against the cohort that earned its name .. DOGE, SHIB, PEPE. Looser confirmation, faster trigger. |
| mature_specialist | Tuned against the bigger, slower large-cap alts .. SOL, AVAX, LINK, NEAR, AAVE. Longer EMAs, broader bear threshold. |
Every transition candidate gets backtested against all four. The report shows you which archetype historically fit the coin best (by Sortino), what each archetype thinks today, and how many of them agree the trade is on. That’s the conviction score. One archetype firing is a maybe. Three of four firing is the room standing up.
The Scanner Is a Bell, Not a Buy Order
The scanner tells you what signal flipped. It does not place the trade for you, and it does not pick the coin for you. Tickers collide constantly in altcoin land .. there are roughly six different “RAIN”s floating around the various exchanges, and you do not want to find out you bought the wrong one.
Before you touch anything:
- Load the 8th Rule on TradingView (free, on my tools page).
- Punch in the exact settings listed for that coin’s starred archetype (the historical best fit). The scanner page has copy buttons next to every value.
- Pull up the chart on your exchange of choice and confirm the signal change.
- If the scanner says BEAR→FULL or BEAR→PROBE on a given bar, your TradingView should show that same flip on that same bar.
- If it doesn’t match .. you’ve got the wrong token, chain, exchange listing, or contract entirely. Confirm the right one before you do anything. Every time. No exceptions.
Read that last bullet once more. The data requires independent verification. Any other route is just gambling.
What This Isn’t
The space this lives in is a sewer of paid shills, Telegram pump groups, and influencers quietly long the bag they’re telling you to buy. So let me be explicit about what the Scanner is not.
- Not financial advice. It’s a mechanical transition detector. What you do with it is on you.
- Not a buy signal. It tells you what flipped .. it does not pick the coin or place the trade. You confirm the chart yourself, every time (see above).
- Not a tip service or a pump group. No coin is surfaced because a founder DM’d me, paid me, or sent me a bag. The scan is deterministic .. the same Python job, the same gates, every night. The machine doesn’t know who anyone is, and neither do I when it runs.
- Not a core allocation tool. This is the satellite, not the engine. The core is still the MRE and the 8th Rule.
The pledge: I don’t get paid to surface anything. I don’t front-run the list. If something changes that, you’ll read it here first .. in plain language, at the top of the page.
A Sandbox. Not Your Whole Book.
I’m not going to pretend this is something it isn’t. The scanner is in beta .. a sandbox, not a core allocation tool.
The core of the book still rides with the MRE and the 8th Rule. That hasn’t changed and it isn’t going to. The Scanner gets a ring-fenced ~3% of the book .. the Sandbox sleeve .. carved out specifically to take controlled stabs at what it surfaces. Nothing here touches the core 97%.
Inside that 3% sleeve, every bet is sized by risk tier .. as a percentage of the sleeve, never the whole book:
| Bet type | Max size (of the sleeve) |
|---|---|
| Established / large-cap alt | up to 10% |
| Standard play | ~6% |
| Wildly speculative .. low-liquidity, low-mcap, meme | ~3% |
There’s no stop-loss. That’s deliberate. Backtested across ~1,000 coins, the alt-tuned 8th Rule carries a ~78% max drawdown .. that’s not a flaw to engineer away, it’s the price of keeping the asymmetric upside, where a handful of names carry the whole sleeve. So the position size is the stop. Each name is sized small enough that a coin gapping to zero overnight .. and in this neighbourhood, some will .. is a rounding error, not a wound. That’s the entire point.
“You don’t hunt 100x memecoins with size. You hunt them with a position you can afford to be completely, embarrassingly wrong about.”
- 3% of the book, total .. the whole sleeve. The other 97% is the engine.
- 3 / 6 / 10% of the sleeve per bet, by risk tier (above).
- 8-10 concurrent plays, max. Often 20-80% in cash .. the signal decides, not the itch.
- 0% leverage. Ever.
- No hard stop .. the size is the stop.
- Every name reviewed by hand .. confirmed on the chart, a little research if I don’t know the coin, then a tactical call. Never blind off the list.
Why a Small Sleeve Is Worth It
The reason this is worth doing at all, even at tiny size, is the asymmetry. The arithmetic is simple .. and it’s all in percentages, so it scales to whatever your book is.
One 20x on a standard 6% position returns 120% of the sleeve .. a single hit more than doubles your entire Sandbox. Every miss, meanwhile, is capped at the size you put on: 6% on a standard play, 3% on a speculative one, even with no stop. With 0% leverage and 8-10 names at a time, the most the sleeve can be underwater at once is bounded by what’s deployed .. and the whole sleeve is just 3% of the book. So the worst realistic case is a couple of percent of total net worth. The best case is uncapped.
That’s the trade: a known, trivial downside for an unknown, asymmetric upside. Position sizing is what turns lottery tickets into a game you can actually keep playing. And if we’re not here to make money, we may as well take up knitting.
Free in the Members Area
Subscribers now get a third tool in the kit. MRE for the macro regime. The 8th Rule for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Gold, and the MRE for SPY / QQQ. And now a nightly net thrown across 500 alts, looking for the fast money the slow engines were never built for.
Free, in the members area, updated every night at ~8:30 PM EST. Pick your spots. Size like you’ll probably be wrong. And confirm the chart yourself before you ever click buy.
.. Durden out. ✊🧹