[Cryptocurrency’s downward spiral in the fourth quarter of 2025 reinforced a visceral understanding of the asset’s volatility and the difficulty of determining the rationale for the continued sell-off. Articles during this period were prevalent with head-scratching and grappling with the market dynamics behind the price collapse. All the while, retail and professional investors were being burned in crypto ETFs, which had reached over $150 billion in assets.
This crypto price downturn underlined the fact that we are all investing in an extreme state of uncertainty, and relying only on assumptions, extrapolations, and predictions in such an environment is a risk that needs to be actively managed. Suggestions for adding a price trend risk management system or overlay became a topic of discussion.
To explore this further, I reached out to Rocco Pellegrinelli, CEO and Founder of Trendrating – an advanced alpha discovery and trend analytics research platform that offers investment managers a risk and opportunity management overlay to any portfolio holdings, including crypto ETFs. He sent me a research flyer that illustrated how his AI-driven price trend model issued crypto ETF trend downgrades well before conventional research or traditional methodologies detected the shift. The research was first published on December 3, 2025, on FactSet and Bloomberg, which provided a strong validation of Trendrating’s capability to anticipate market shifts before they became apparent. This early warning mechanism is crucial in the crypto space, where volatility is high, and quick adjustments can make a significant difference in managing both risk and opportunity for investors. I asked him questions to better understand how his research platform was designed to validate and capture price trends on the growing number of crypto ETFs.]
Tooth: Can you explain your thinking behind building the Trendrating research platform?
Pellegrinelli: Our goal has always been to develop the investment research tools that professional asset managers need and deserve, providing broader market information than what conventional data and tools provide. We fill this crucial knowledge gap.
We believe that the investment strategies and models of professional managers will benefit from better information based on pragmatic fact-finding. This allows factual insights to be discovered that have a measurable impact on the quality of the investment decision process.
Our core belief is simple: understanding and respecting price trends is not optional – it is essential. Market research must reflect not only the fundamental factors, but also the sentiment, momentum and patterns that often precede key events.
Tooth: What does “respect for” and monitoring price developments benefit investment managers?
Pellegrinelli: On the one hand, it provides an early warning system. It’s like being able to feel the slight vibration of a railroad track coming from a distant but rapidly approaching train, or being able to look under calm water to discern the gathering undercurrents and tides that could pull potentially strong swimmers, or investors in our case, dangerously underwater.
Likewise, positive price trend indicators signal the build-up of favorable underlying momentum – the increasing trading activity as it occurs in real time, from large institutional and other large players building positions.
This provides great support for managers in their buying and selling decisions.
Tooth: How does this apply to crypto ETFs?
Pellegrinelli: Rather than trying to figure out the big picture of what’s going on in the crypto industry or trying to predict Bitcoin’s price direction, the research platform focuses on reading the underlying trading activity of a crypto ETF to see what’s actually happening on the ground, to determine what pressures are building that could impact the ETF price.
We remain cool independent of the crypto story and predictions about cryptocurrencies. We have no biases or desired outcomes regarding the underlying assets we monitor. We focus on validating price trends as they occur. This gives us clarity and commitment to our unique efforts to provide a more focused risk and opportunity management system for our professional investor clients.
Tooth: How is your Trend Rating system different from other trend analysis tools?
Pellegrinelli: Unlike other trend assessment systems, our advanced AI-driven trend analyzes can isolate each trade to validate and capture price trends as they happen, unlike others that can work mathematically based on daily rates or other methods.
Conventional methodologies may have drawbacks that need to be managed. The momentum can come late because it takes several months of price action before a trend is identified and therefore works mainly on long-term trends. Technical analysis indicators can help, but many of them can be inconsistent across different market cycles (ranging or trending) and volatility phases.
Trend Rating provides an AI-driven, multi-factorial model that decodes buying and selling pressure, the driving force behind medium-term trends. Our advanced AI technology makes it easy to monitor over 17,000 stocks worldwide and receive timely alerts on any trend reversal.
That’s why our research platform was able to deliver a bear trend signal to crypto ETFs that were near their tops before most of the damage from the price drop was done. Their sharp decline illustrates how quickly market sentiment can change and how quickly massive losses can be caused. That’s why best-in-class research and methodology to detect price trend reversals in time should be part of every sound investment process.
Tooth: Are there any other thoughts you can share on how advisors, asset managers and other professional investors can use these types of advanced research tools for price trend analysis?
Pellegrinelli: We specifically designed our modern data research platform with AI technology (including an AI assistant) and enhanced market intelligence capabilities that, with a few clicks, can be quickly added as a research and decision-making overlay to any investment manager’s current investment process., including managing crypto ETFs.
We are currently inviting and offering managers extended free trials to demonstrate and prove with facts how our advanced AI price trend analysis and alpha discovery research platform can provide enhanced market intelligence, strengthen risk management and improve investment performance for any manager, using any investment methodology.
This article was originally published here and is republished on Wealthtender with permission.
About the author
Bill Tooth
Founder Institute for Innovation Development
Bill Hortz is an independent business consultant and founder/dean of the Institute for Innovation Development, a platform and network for business innovation in the financial services industry. With over 30 years of experience in the financial services industry, including expertise in asset manager sales/marketing/branding, as well as creatively restructuring and developing internal/external sales and strategic account departments for 5 major financial firms including OppenheimerFunds, Neuberger&Berman and Templeton Funds Distributors. His broad experiences have led Bill to a strong belief, passion and advocacy for strategic thinking, innovation creation and strategic account management as the nexus of business skills needed to meet a business environment challenged by an increasingly rapid pace of change.
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