Skip to content
Terminal

Updated

What counts as an unusual crypto move?

"Unusual" is a comparison, not a mood. A move is large or small next to a percent you typed, a percent the app uses for every coin, or the way that one coin has been moving. Those three comparisons answer different questions. Mixing them up is how a watchlist becomes a pile of messages, or goes silent, without you being able to say which.

This page explains the comparisons. It does not say a move will continue, and it does not tell you to buy, sell, or hold.

A fixed percent is the same bar for every coin

The simplest alert fires when the price has risen or fallen by at least a percent you chose, inside a window you also chose.

Robinhood's price-alert article, opened 2026-10-11, publishes two thresholds: 5% and 10%. With 5% selected, alerts arrive for both 5% and 10% moves. With 10% selected, only the 10% moves qualify. Crypto can use up to five timeframes. The page does not name them. A 52-week high or low, if you turn it on, is limited to one high and one low per stock or asset per week.

You can read a published percent. That is the virtue. The limit is that the bar does not know the coin. A coin that usually drifts and a coin that usually swings are measured with the same ruler. The first may almost never qualify. The second may qualify on an ordinary day. The alert is doing what it says. The ruler is coarse.

Kraken Pro also lets you type a price, or step from the current price with percentage buttons, and set above or below. "Market Alerts," last updated 20 January 2026, does not list the size of those steps. A typed price fires when the last price crosses it, whatever the coin's recent habit has been.

"Major" and "volatile" are often unpublished

Some products skip the typed percent and send a notice when they consider the move large.

CoinGecko's Auto Price Alerts article, opened 2026-10-11, says you are notified when a coin you searched "makes a major move." It does not publish the percent, the window, or the math. Auto alerts are on by default when notifications are on. They expire after 45 days. A web search can subscribe you, and the push still goes to the app if you are logged in. If a Price Movement Alert already covers that coin, you get one notification, and that alert wins. You can turn the feature off. You still cannot read the threshold.

Kraken Pro's volatility alerts cover markets you have favorited. The notice includes the 24-hour percent and the current price. The help page does not say what percent, or what multiple of recent movement, causes the notice. You can unfavorite a market. You cannot audit the bar from the article.

An unpublished bar can nudge you. It cannot be tuned, because you do not know where it sits.

A range inside a window is not the close-to-close change

Cryptocurrency Alerting calculates a percentage alert from the high and the low inside the previous window. The FAQ, opened 2026-10-11, says it computes the change from low to high and from high to low, then uses whichever is bigger.

That method is stated. It is not "the price at the end of the hour versus the price at the start." A coin can travel a long way inside the window and finish near where it began. The high-to-low percent is large. A close-to-close percent is small. Checking the alert against a candle close answers a different question than the FAQ.

The FAQ does not scale that percent by the coin's own history. The window you pick still applies one bar to every asset. The cooldown, described separately, only limits how often the alert may notify you.

Volatility is that coin's own spread

A volatility-adjusted alert changes the bar when the coin's recent movement changes.

The NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods, section 1.3.5.6, defines the sample standard deviation as the square root of the variance. The variance is the sum of squared distances from the mean, divided by one less than the number of points. The square root puts the result back in the units of the data. Percent returns have a standard deviation in percent. A larger one means the recent returns were more spread out.

One way to use that number, without adding a second definition, is to divide a new percent move by the recent standard deviation of percent moves. The result is a multiple. "Two times the recent spread" is a different event on a quiet coin than on a wild one. The handbook defines spread. It does not pick the multiple, the window, or which returns to use. A product that uses the idea still has to choose those, and put them on the screen.

Section 1.3.5.6 also defines the median absolute deviation: the median of the absolute distances from the median. Section 1.3.5.1 defines the median as the middle point of a sorted list, or the average of the two middle points when the count is even. NIST notes that extreme tails pull a standard deviation harder than they pull a median absolute deviation. Crypto returns throw off large prints. The two scale measures will not mark the same hours. Neither one says what the next price will do. The screen has to name which one it used.

What the screen has to show

If the bar moves, the screen names the coin, the window, and the percent that counts right now, from history it actually stored. When that history is missing, it says so and waits. A round percent in the gap would invent a bar. A fixed-percent alert stays a separate rule, so a level you typed is not silently replaced.

An unusual move is not a rating of the coin. A bad price from one venue can push a coin past its recent range. Robinhood's 5% bar, Cryptocurrency Alerting's high-to-low percent, and a multiple of recent standard deviation are three measurements. Quote the measurement, the source, and the time, and a disagreement is checkable.

Terminal shows the percent an unusual-move rule means today, from that coin's own recent movement, and it treats the alert as a price record rather than a recommendation.

FAQ

Is a 5% move always unusual?

No. On Robinhood, 5% and 10% are the published price-movement choices, as of the help page opened 2026-10-11. They are the same percents for each asset. Whether that percent is large for a given coin depends on how that coin has been moving. A fixed threshold does not measure that.

Why do two apps disagree about the same hour?

They often answer different questions. One may use a fixed percent. One may use the larger of the high-to-low and low-to-high moves, which is Cryptocurrency Alerting's stated method. One may divide the move by that coin's recent standard deviation, as the NIST handbook defines standard deviation. The messages differ because the rules differ.

What if the app will not show the percent?

Then you cannot tune it. CoinGecko's auto-alert article and Kraken Pro's volatility section, both opened 2026-10-11, describe a notice without a trigger percent. You can turn those notices off. A rule you intend to keep needs the percent on the screen, and it needs to say when price history is missing.

Sources

Pages opened 2026-10-11 unless noted.

Start free