
What you'll learn 👉
What is rebalancing?
Rebalancing is a common portfolio management strategy used to maintain your desired asset allocation and control risk. By periodically buying or selling assets, investors can prevent their portfolio from becoming overly concentrated in a single cryptocurrency or sector while staying aligned with their long-term investment strategy.
It is done by either selling or buying assets in your portfolio in order to balance them against each other at a level you are comfortable with. Over time, different assets will perform differently, causing their portfolio weights to drift away from their original allocation.
How does rebalancing work?
Periodically, whether it is every week, month, or quarter for example, you sell and buy the necessary assets to have them at a level of portfolio allocation that you desire.
👉 For example, if you have two assets, each holding 50% of your portfolio and asset A increases by 100% which Asset B remains at its original level, your portfolio now consists of 66.67% Asset A and 33.33% Asset B. To rebalance your portfolio, you would simply sell some of Asset A, buy some of Asset B, or both in order to get it back to the desired level of 50% of your portfolio in each asset.
Why rebalancing a crypto portfolio?
Rebalancing is a popular investing practice and has been for a long time, way before crypto was ever concieved, though despite this, the cryptocurrency market is a market that can benefit from it greatly. Due to the intense and often unpredictable volatility of the cryptocurrency market, especially in smaller coins, it is not uncommon to see anything from a 10% to a 1000% rise over a period of time. If you are managing a large portfolio especially, it can be very important to rebalance your coins so that your portfolio isn’t wiped out by a coin that you have become over-exposed to due to price increases.
Common Rebalancing Strategies
Calendar Rebalancing
Calendar Rebalancing is one of the simplest and most common forms of rebalancing out there. Using this method, you rebalance your portfolio after a certain period of time, usually a week, month or even a quarter depending on factors such as the industry, risk tolerance and more.
👉 This is a very easy strategy to manage as you simply make a few transactions at a set time every interval, and you don’t need to pay any other attention to your rebalancing strategy other than that one rebalancing session.
Many crypto portfolio management platforms can automate this process, allowing investors to maintain their target allocations without manually placing trades.
Percentage-Of-Portfolio Rebalancing
P-O-P Rebalancing is when you rebalance your portfolio in accordance with the original weights (e.g. An asset representing 10% of total portfolio.) This method is very common and is more than suitable for the crypto market, due to how fast the market can change, regular rebalancing helps investors maintain their intended risk exposure as market conditions change.
👉 Often in crypto you can see one of your coins fly all the way to the moon, but too often people will let it fall all the way back down without selling, this is why rebalancing is important, as if you don’t put your holdings to their original weights, you are set to lose a lot from one coin.
Both this strategy and the previously mentioned Calendar rebalancing strategy are “Constant-mix” strategies. This simply means that the weight of the holdings/the percentages of your portfolio that your assets take up don’t change.
Constant-Proportion Portfolio Insurance
This strategy is more commonly used in traditional portfolio management than in everyday crypto investing. CPPI focuses on protecting a minimum portfolio value while allowing exposure to higher-risk assets when the portfolio grows.
👉 CPPI works off the idea that the investor has a certain amount of money they are wanting to risk more or less than the rest of their portfolio. Using mathematical equations, we can determine how much of their assets should be put in riskier assets such as stocks or crypto and how many in no-risk assets such as risk-free securities.
CPPI strategies are very subjective, and the fine details are often defined by the user and the market in which they are investing. Certain factors must be determined such as the rebalancing period, and just how risky their risk tolerable assets are.
Tax Implications (US Specific)
Crypto rebalancing can create tax consequences because selling one cryptocurrency to buy another may trigger a taxable event depending on your country’s regulations.
Investors should consider:
- Using tax-loss harvesting where available
- Avoiding unnecessary trades
- Keeping detailed transaction records
- Understanding local cryptocurrency tax rules
Tax treatment differs significantly between countries, so investors should consult local tax guidance before implementing an aggressive rebalancing strategy.
One good way to try and minimise the tax implications on your crypto portfolio is to put new contributions into your account, on smaller, less appreciated assets. This will reduce transactions and will charge you less tax overall. Though by putting your money into your underappreciated positions, it might be a while before those positions start moving.
Another way is to reinvest any dividends or profit you make into your smaller, less-appreciated positions, rather than your overinflated ones. This will help boost up your positions which are still yet to rise, without having to pay as much tax spreading them out.
Rebalancing frequency
The frequency of your rebalancing is largely influenced by the market that you are trading. Cryptocurrency is an extremely volatile, fast moving, emotional market. This means that it is good to rebalance often, as although you could make it fast, you could lose it too, so it’s good to rebalance often and bank those gains by spreading them across the profile.
A lot of people in the crypto space who rebalance their whole portfolio do it on a weekly basis. Though often in crypto, people will rebalance a coin once it hits their price goals. This means that once a coin they have invested in has hit its target price, they will sell the coin and rebalance that over their existing positions, and or invest some of the profits into a new position.
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When Does Rebalancing Outperform hodling
The cryptocurrency social trading platform Shrimpy did a study on the benefits of HODLing your coins compared to the benefits of rebalancing, and it found that in a large majority of portfolios that rebalancing was more profitable. They tested the results of buying a random selection of 2-10 cryptocurrency assets of a period of time and found that most scenarios were beneficial to rebalancers. For example, one of the better performing experiments was rebalancing every hour. The report states that portfolios that select 10 cryptoassets at random and rebalanced the portfolio every hour, had a median average of performing 234% better than their hodl equivalents. With the same experiments except the rebalance period is once per month; you would have a 99.75% chance of outperforming hodling.
This is an incredible figure which illustrates how much a of a powerful tool rebalancing is.
Best Crypto Rebalancing tools:
Quadency
Quadencyoffers a rebalancing bot with their services, which will automatically rebalance your portfolio, so you don’t need to think about it. You have a great level of control over the bot’s parameters. You are able to select the specific assets that are eligible for rebalancing, their allocations, the interval at which you wish to rebalance (anywhere from hourly to one-time), and lastly the threshold.
As Quadency facilitates more than just portfolio rebalancing, they sell their services in packages. The cheapest package that contains their rebalancing bot is the “Pro” plan, coming in at $49 per month.
3commas
3Commas.io offers a simple rebalancing tool on the portfolio section of their platform. Here you can setup the program so that after a certain period of time, your portfolio will automatically buy and sell assets to rebalance your portfolio.
With 3Commas.io you can sign up using their free trial, once this has concluded you can purchase any of their plans in order to gain access to the portfolio tools. The cheapest plan available to purchase is the “Starter” plan which comes in at $14.50 per month.
CoinStats
CoinStats is one of the most popular crypto portfolio management platforms, allowing investors to track assets across multiple exchanges, wallets, and blockchains from a single dashboard. While its primary focus is portfolio tracking rather than automated trading, it offers powerful portfolio analytics, allocation monitoring, and performance insights that make it much easier to rebalance your holdings manually.
The platform supports hundreds of wallets and exchange connections, giving users a complete overview of their cryptocurrency investments without switching between multiple apps. Investors can quickly see when certain assets have grown beyond their target allocation and make informed rebalancing decisions.
CoinStats is particularly well suited for long-term investors who want to monitor diversified portfolios, track gains and losses, and receive alerts when their portfolio allocation drifts away from their desired percentages.
Coinrule
Coinrule is a no-code crypto trading automation platform that enables users to create custom trading strategies without writing any code. Although it is best known for automated trading rules, investors can also use Coinrule to build strategies that help maintain target portfolio allocations by automatically buying or selling assets when predefined conditions are met.
The platform integrates with many of the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges and provides an intuitive rule builder, making it accessible for beginners while still offering enough flexibility for more experienced traders. Users can choose from hundreds of pre-built strategy templates or create their own automation rules from scratch.
Coinrule is an excellent choice for investors who want more control over how and when their portfolio is rebalanced, especially if they prefer threshold-based automation instead of fixed schedules.
Conclusion
As you can see, auto-relabalancing tools can help you grow your crypto portfolio and beat a simple HODL strategy that most crypto users consider a safe bet.
FAQs
What is crypto portfolio rebalancing?
Crypto portfolio rebalancing is the process of buying and selling cryptocurrencies to restore a portfolio back to its target allocation.
How often should I rebalance my crypto portfolio?
Many investors rebalance monthly, quarterly, or when an asset moves beyond a predetermined percentage threshold.
Is crypto rebalancing better than HODLing?
Neither strategy is guaranteed to outperform. Rebalancing focuses on maintaining risk levels, while HODLing allows investors to keep full exposure to long-term asset growth.
Are crypto rebalancing bots safe?
Rebalancing bots can reduce manual work, but investors should consider exchange security, API permissions, platform reputation, and fees before connecting accounts.
