How to Choose the Right Trading Pair for Your Crypto Strategy

22 November 2025

Choosing the right trading pair isn’t just about picking two coins that look interesting. It’s the difference between making consistent profits and getting wiped out by a sudden correlation breakdown. If you’re trading crypto, your pair is your foundation. Get it wrong, and even the best entry signal won’t save you. Get it right, and you can profit whether the market is going up, down, or sideways.

What Exactly Is a Trading Pair?

A trading pair is two assets quoted against each other. When you see ETH/BTC, you’re not buying Ethereum alone-you’re buying ETH with BTC as the price reference. The first asset (ETH) is the base currency. The second (BTC) is the quote currency. Your profit or loss depends on how the value of ETH changes relative to BTC.

Most traders start with crypto-to-fiat pairs like BTC/USD or ETH/USDT. But serious pairs traders move beyond that. They trade crypto-to-crypto pairs like SOL/ETH or ADA/BTC because these offer more nuanced price movements and better opportunities for market-neutral strategies. Stablecoin pairs (like LTC/USDC) are less volatile but also offer smaller profit windows. The key is matching the pair type to your strategy.

Why Correlation Isn’t Enough

You’ve probably heard someone say, “ETH and BTC always move together.” That’s true most of the time-but not all the time. And that’s where traders lose money.

Correlation measures how two assets move in relation to each other over time. A correlation of 0.90 means they move almost in sync. But correlation can be misleading. In 2021, ETH/BTC had a 0.88 correlation for months-then dropped to 0.32 in just 90 days during the DeFi boom. Traders who assumed the relationship would hold got crushed.

What you need is cointegration. This is a statistical concept that says two assets may drift apart temporarily, but they’ll eventually return to their historical relationship. Cointegration is what separates professional pairs traders from gamblers.

A cointegrated pair like BNB/ETH might diverge by 15% over a week, but over the next 30 days, it snaps back. That’s your opportunity. Correlation tells you they move together. Cointegration tells you they’ll come back together.

How to Test for Cointegration (Without a PhD)

You don’t need to run regression models manually. Platforms like Binance and Wundertrading have built-in tools. But here’s what you’re looking for:

• Use at least 500 days of historical price data
• Run an Engle-Granger test (available in TradingView scripts or Python libraries like statsmodels)
• Look for a p-value below 0.05-that means the pair is statistically cointegrated
• Check the spread’s mean-reversion behavior: if it keeps drifting away, ditch it

A simple rule of thumb: if a pair’s correlation has been above 0.85 for the last year and its spread hasn’t broken out of its 2-year range, it’s worth testing. If it’s a new pair with less than 100 days of history? Avoid it.

Liquidity Matters More Than You Think

A pair might look perfect on paper-strong cointegration, clean spread-but if you can’t enter or exit without slippage, it’s a trap.

The minimum daily volume you need:

• Crypto-to-crypto pairs (like ETH/BTC): At least $5 million in 24-hour volume
• Crypto-to-stablecoin pairs (like SOL/USDT): At least $50 million

Pairs under these thresholds often have wide bid-ask spreads. You might buy at $2,800 and immediately sell at $2,785-losing 0.5% before the price even moves. That eats into your edge fast.

Binance supports over 1,200 pairs. Coinbase Pro has only 180. If you’re serious about pairs trading, Binance or Kraken are your best bets. Smaller exchanges? Avoid them unless you’re testing a niche strategy with less than 1% of your capital.

Which Pairs Work Best in Different Markets?

Not all pairs perform the same in every market condition.

• When BTC dominance is above 50%: Trade BTC-pegged pairs like ADA/BTC or XRP/BTC. Altcoins tend to weaken against Bitcoin in risk-off environments.
• When BTC dominance drops below 45%: Look at altcoin-to-altcoin pairs like SOL/AVAX or DOT/MATIC. Money is rotating out of Bitcoin and into mid-cap alts.
• In sideways markets: Pairs trading shines. The 2022 bear market saw top pairs strategies return 12.7% with 45% less drawdown than holding BTC.
• In strong bull runs: Pairs trading underperforms. During Bitcoin’s 160% rally in 2023, the best pairs strategies only made 4.2%-while spot BTC returned 160%. Don’t force pairs trading when the market is clearly directional.

Track BTC dominance daily. It’s one of the simplest signals to adjust your pair selection.

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Most retail traders fail at pairs trading because they skip the basics.

• Mistake: Trading low-volume pairs like FTM/ETH. Solution: Stick to pairs with $5M+ volume. FTM/ETH had slippage over 2.5% during the FTX collapse.
• Mistake: Assuming correlation = cointegration. Solution: Always test for stationarity. 30-40% of highly correlated pairs never revert.
• Mistake: Putting 10% of your portfolio into one pair. Solution: Never risk more than 2% of capital per pair. Diversify across 5-10 uncorrelated pairs.
• Mistake: Ignoring black swan events. Solution: During Black Thursday 2020, ETH/BTC correlation flipped from +0.85 to -0.12 in 48 hours. Use dynamic alerts for >30% correlation deviations.

Tools That Actually Help

You don’t need to code your own bot. But you do need the right tools.

• Binance Pairs Analytics Dashboard: Launched in August 2023, it gives real-time cointegration scores and historical correlation charts.
• TradingView + Custom Scripts: Use the “Cointegration Test” script (free community scripts exist) to scan pairs automatically.
• Wundertrading: Offers a pairs scanner with backtested performance data and alerts for spread deviations.
• TokenMetrics Moonshot Finder: Uses LSTM neural networks to predict pair stability with 78.4% accuracy over 30 days.

Start with Binance’s built-in tools. They’re free and accurate enough for beginners.

Beginner’s Roadmap: From Zero to First Trade

If you’ve never traded a pair before, here’s how to start:

1. Choose one high-liquidity pair: ETH/BTC or SOL/USDT
2. Download 1 year of daily price data (Binance API or TradingView)
3. Run a cointegration test (use a free script or tool)
4. Check the spread: does it revert within 7-14 days?
5. Backtest a simple strategy: buy the base when spread is 2 standard deviations above mean, sell when it returns to mean
6. Trade with 1% of your capital on a demo account for 30 days
7. Only go live when you’ve had 3 successful trades in a row with no drawdown over 3%

Most beginners skip steps 2-5 and jump straight to live trading. That’s how you lose.

The Future of Pairs Trading

Pairs trading is becoming more automated-and more competitive. Since 2018, the alpha (excess return) from basic pairs strategies has decayed by 65% due to algorithmic traders flooding the market.

That doesn’t mean it’s dead. It means you need to be smarter. The winners in 2025 will be those who combine:

• Machine learning to detect non-linear relationships
• Dynamic position sizing based on volatility
• Real-time correlation monitoring
• Strict risk controls (max 2% per pair, 10% total portfolio exposure)

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 45% of crypto traders will use some form of pairs strategy. But only 18.3% of retail traders will make money. The rest will blame the market. The real difference? Statistical discipline.