Three Macro Signals Align for Altcoins: But Is It Alt Season?

The ISM Manufacturing PMI has cleared 52 for 3 straight months, but a genuine alt season requires it to push past 55.

The ALT/BTC chart has printed four consecutive green MACD bars for the first time in nearly 6 years, according to popular analyst Ash Crypto.

The last time this happened, there was a 60% altcoin outperformance against Bitcoin over the three months that followed.

Three Signals Converging

In an April 2 post on X, Ash Crypto explained that for four years after the 2022 bear market, ALT/BTC was often in the red and oversold, reinforcing the feeling that altcoins have never truly recovered and Bitcoin is running alone.

However, they are now pointing to three developments happening at the same time that they said would make for excellent news for altcoin holders.

First and most eye-catching is the MACD signal, which measures momentum shifts by comparing two moving averages of price. The analyst says that the metric has now printed four green bars in a row on the ALT/BTC monthly chart. This last happened in August 2020, right before a big altcoin rally against BTC, when money moved from the main cryptocurrency to the smaller assets.

The second factor is the ISM Manufacturing PMI, a monthly index that measures activity in the U.S. manufacturing sector. A reading above 55 helped trigger two alt seasons in the past, in 2017 and 2021, and Ash Crypto noted that it has gone above 52 for three consecutive months, last seen in October 2022.

Furthermore, they noted that U.S. CPI inflation has fallen to a five-year low, which puts less pressure on the Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy, therefore creating a more favorable environment for risk assets like altcoins.

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“This is the most bullish macro backdrop for risk assets including alts in years,” the analyst stated.

Not Quite Yet Alt Season

Nevertheless, Ash Crypto stopped short of calling a full altcoin season, saying for that to happen, ISM will have to go past 55, and there must be broad liquidity expansion, as well as a sustained drop in BTC dominance, all happening at the same time.

What they described instead was the possibility of a meaningful two-to-three-month recovery, provided Bitcoin clears $76,000 and Ethereum follows toward the $2,800 to $3,200 range.

However, soon after the initial analysis, Ash Crypto followed up to point out that a highly anticipated speech from U.S. President Donald Trump regarding the ongoing conflict in the Middle East had already complicated the picture.

“No analysis is going to work when Trump can destroy the chart and setup with a single speech,” they noted.

With Trump warning that the U.S. will hit Iran “extremely hard” in the next couple of weeks, BTC retreated below $67,000, and ETH dipped back under $2,100, with the crypto market shaving over 3% from its market cap, per CoinGecko.

Meanwhile, data published on March 30 by analyst Darkfost showed that more than 40% of altcoins were trading at or near their all-time lows, a reading that was way worse than what was seen during the 2022 bear market.

In addition, XWIN Research Japan today flagged a bearish outlook for most major altcoins, including ETH, XRP, Solana, and BNB, with data from CryptoRank showing that only seven tokens posted positive returns in Q1 2026, and Tron’s TRX was the only one from the top 10 that ended the quarter in the green.