Can We Use the Litecoin Price to Predict That of Bitcoin?

Analyst @woonomic posted a chart that shows the movement of three coins: Litecoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin. According to him, the LTC price often leads that of BTC, so since LTC has been increasing at a faster rate than Bitcoin, he is expecting the BTC price to increase in the near future.

LTC has a habit of leading BTC.

Shorters gonna be rekt (not from just this chart but from other fundamentals too). pic.twitter.com/v1JeeVyd1Q

— Willy Woo (@woonomic) April 7, 2020

Does the Litecoin price actually lead that of BTC? If so, where will the BTC price go to next? Continue reading below if you want to find out. Note: Considering that the tweet alludes that LTC is leading BTC without mentioning ETH, and since we have already made an article determining if ETH is leading the market, this article will only focus on the relationship between the prices of LTC and BTC.

Yearly Relationship

The Bitcoin (candlestick) and Litecoin (blue) prices over the past year are shown in the graph below. The prices of both assets were going hand in hand until June 22, 2019. On that date, the LTC price reached a high, while BTC followed suit shortly after, reaching a high after four days. Afterwards, the prices of both began to decrease. Therefore, this was the first case over the past year in which the price of Litecoin was leading that of Bitcoin. The prices of both assets continued following each other, with the BTC decreases being less pronounced until Jan. 8, 2020. In this case, it was the BTC price that was leading that of LTC. Afterwards, this occurrence still held true even in the next high, which was reached on Feb. 22 in the case of BTC and on Feb. 25 for LTC.

Looking at the long-term chart, the hypothesis that the LTC price leads that of BTC does not hold true. Let’s take a look at a short-term one to see if it will change this verdict.

Short-Term Movement

The hourly chart shows nothing to dissuade us from our previous finding. While the April 6 high occurred slightly earlier in LTC than BTC, the price of neither has led the other at least since the beginning of April.

To conclude, the prices of both BTC and LTC have led each other at different points in time during their price history. However, the event has not been consistent enough to be confirmed as an occurrence that allows us to use the price of one asset to predict the other.