Why 2025 Broke Crypto Playbooks—and What Actually Worked

Joe Shew, CEO of the Crypto Consulting Institute, has shared some insights about crypto trading in 2025: being in altcoins was a bad move; being in Bitcoin was a less bad move; and being in gold was a good move. This investing stuff is easy, isn’t it?

While these insights are obvious in hindsight — after all, we all know altcoins got wrecked last year while gold smashed all-time highs — Shew dug into why so many crypto investors got it wrong in 2025, how they could’ve done better, and what they can change to get a better result in 2026.

Speaking to Pav Hundal on the Tapping Into Crypto Podcast earlier this week, Shew said that what most pundits and punters got fundamentally wrong was their price predictions. Largely because they used a hope-based, rather than data-based, approach to the market.

“I saw so many ‘analysts’ or so-called ‘experts’ coming out and saying US$150k, US$180k, here’s my strategy, here’s what I’m going to do,” Shew said, adding “my thought was the complete opposite.”

People were too busy listening to the pied piper, instead of creating music of their own based on data and information. That’s probably the number one thing that people got wrong.

Joe Shew, CEO of Crypto Consulting Institute

Shew said that investors would’ve been much better off paying less attention to crypto influencers and analysts and instead looking at the data to help make investing decisions.

Without a data-driven approach, many people FOMOed into the wrong things in 2025, particularly altcoins, based on hype and stayed in them based on hope, Shew explained.

“What wrecked people is they trade Sui, Solana, XRP — whatever it is — against USDt, they don’t have that third dimension of how is it performing against Bitcoin…”

Just picking on Sui as an example, it’s 65% down against Bitcoin, but people still buy and people still hold it in the hope it’ll go up, and it’s nothing more than hope, it’s not data-driven analysis.

Joe Shew, CEO of Crypto Consulting Institute

A better approach, Shew said, was to simply stay in Bitcoin and wait for a weekly confirmation of a change in market momentum to take profit. This approach, according to Shew, made it easier to spot that when Bitcoin crossed US$120k (AU$175k) in October, it was a good time to take profits.

“Where people got it wrong was they were investing in alts when they should’ve been in Bitcoin, where people got it wrong was they were trading daily charts on altcoins,” Shew said.

Shew also suggested the four-year crypto cycle as we know it is over, driven by the entrance of institutions and ETFs.

“The four-year cycle’s broken from the institutional perspective,” he said.

“Also from that 80% drawdown narrative — the drawdown’s [currently] 36%…We’ve seen a huge dynamic shift in tops and bottoms, it’s the law of diminishing returns…maybe these blowoff top huge outcomes are just not reality anymore.”

Related: Behind the Volatility: Key Takeaways from Crypto’s Q4 2025

Two Things Crypto Investors Should Take Into 2026: Shew

After a confusing — and for many crypto investors — demoralising 2025, characterised by underperformance across the crypto market and widespread apparent market manipulation, what advice does Shew have for navigating a potential crypto bear market in 2026?

Shew’s single takeaway for crypto investors in 2026 is simple.

If it’s not beating Bitcoin, don’t trade it.

Joe Shew, CEO of Crypto Consulting Institute

Essentially, this means stay out of alts other than the one or two that are outperforming Bitcoin for short periods of time. An example would be buying Zcash in Q4 of 2025 while its price surged ahead of the rest of the market.

Related: UBS CEO: Blockchain’s Takeover of Traditional Banking Is Inevitable

Shew added that another important change would be trading on weekly candles, not daily. Doing this helps to avoid catching short-term pumps at their highs just to ride them all the way back down again.

“If you implement those two things your performance in 2026 will change drastically,” Shew said.