Do low-priced coins outperform expensive ones?
No. On crypto perpetual futures from February 2021 to September 2026, a portfolio holding the coins with the lowest price per token against the most expensive lost money after costs (Sharpe ratio −0.40), and every variant we tried was negative. The low-price premium that Blume and Husic found in US stocks from 1932 to 1971 does not carry over to tokens, whose unit price is a design choice.
The claim
Blume and Husic showed that low-priced US stocks earned higher returns than high-priced ones in 1932–1971, a result later catalogued among stock-market anomalies as the price signal. In crypto the idea has a popular twin: coins priced in fractions of a cent are seen as having more room to run than coins that cost thousands of dollars each.
What we tested
We ranked perpetual futures by the price of a single token, adjusting contracts that bundle 1,000 tokens, from February 2021 to September 2026, including contracts that were later delisted. Portfolios held the cheapest coins against the most expensive, rebalanced monthly as in the stock-market version and in several faster variants, with trading costs. Results were checked against placebos with randomised returns and against coins’ volatility, trading volume, age and tick size.
Result
The main portfolio had a net Sharpe ratio of −0.40, and all twelve variants plus the stock-market construction were negative, from −0.48 to −0.13: cheap coins lagged expensive ones, the opposite of the claim, though the reverse bet was not reliable either. Token price turns out to be mostly a coin’s listing price plus its path since listing. The expensive list barely changes — 85% of it is the same two years later — while the cheap list turns over constantly as new coins are listed (19% overlap).
Cheapest minus most expensive coins by token price, Feb 2021 – Sep 2026
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Main portfolio, Sharpe ratio after costs | −0.40 |
| Range across all 13 constructions | −0.48 to −0.13 |
| Expensive list, same coins two years later | 85% |
| Cheap list, same coins two years later | 19% |
What it means
A token’s unit price says nothing about value: supply is fixed at launch, so a coin can be cheap per token and expensive in total. What a “cheap” label mostly carries is recency — the cheap list is dominated by recent listings — and that has not been a source of extra return.
What would change the verdict
Spot markets, where retail demand for cheap coins actually trades, and venues that do not repackage sub-cent tokens into 1,000-token contracts are the places where a unit-price effect could still show up.
This note re-tests a claim made by the cited authors on our own crypto market data; the summary of their method is ours. Tested · published · last reviewed . Research, not investment advice.