The crypto asset market experienced a steady decline in early 2026, possibly due to a shift toward gold amid economic uncertainty.
This monthly market chart in Kraken tells the sad story in technicolour!
Overall, the tide is going out.
Holding and hoping for a turnaround in this market is like burning money.
Buying on the way down is just dollar cost averaging your losses. Throwing more money on the burning fire.
How Do You Make Money in a Declining Market?
For stock markets, trading options can be profitable regardless of market direction.
Day traders buy and sell based on the rise and fall of prices in periods ranging from minutes to hours. They avoid holding on to losing trades or holding overnight.
Kraken offers a comprehensive set of trading analysis and conditional trading tools to facilitate day and swing trading.
Kraken Mobile also offers Bundles, curated collections of assets that provide resilience in a highly volatile and fickle market.
In both approaches, the strategy is the same.
Buy When Prices Rise, Sell When Prices Drop
That seems self-evident, but numerous psychological factors make it difficult to practice. One is the Optimism Bias. We hope it will turn around soon.
The only mathematical considerations are the spread and fees. You will generally need at least a 3% gain to make money on a trade,
That does not, however, justify watching your trade lose 10% or more day.
If your $100,000 portfolio loses $30,000 a week while you watch it burn, the fees and spread seem irrelevant.
I aim to lose no more than 2% on any one trade.
How to Trend Trade with Kraken Bundles
Kraken bundles are curated collections similar to mutual funds.
Here is the mix of assets in some of the bundles.
You can buy and sell in small increments.
There is an option to auto-buy daily, weekly, or monthly to build up a portfolio with dollar-cost averaging.
The bundles also auto-rebalance periodically to adjust to market conditions.
Perfect for mostly hands-off investing.
My observation is that the bundles are somewhat resilient to market volatility because of diversification.
However, they will still decline alongside the overall market.
Here are the weekly trends for three bundles.
Like stocks or individual assets, no need to watch your money burn.
I sell part of the bundle holding when prices are falling and buy when prices are rising.
Perhaps check daily and make some decisions.
There is no shame or regret in sitting mostly in cash in a falling market.
Day Trading with Kraken
It is much easier to trade when markets are rising steadily (everyone looks like a genius). Still, there are always opportunities for a skilled and disciplined day trader to make money.
Kraken tracks Gainers, which can gain 10-200% in a single day!
There are opportunities.
I wrote an article recently with considerable detail on the strategy indicators and execution for skillful trades.