Luke Davis says an altcoin has to beat Bitcoin to earn its place

Every altcoin in Luke Davis’s portfolio has the same job description: beat Bitcoin, or make room for more of it. The rule is why Davis calls himself “a bit of a trader” on the crypto side of his book, even though the equity core of the same portfolio is built to be held for five to ten years.

Davis is the Founder and Chief Market Strategist of Bull Market Blueprint, an investing education community for entrepreneurs and high earners who want to run their own money. He manages a multi-seven-figure portfolio of his own across equities, precious metals and crypto, and shares his actual positions with members. He sat down with Ashton Addison on Crypto Coin Show on Monday, 5 October 2026, five years after the two last met in Tulum.

The ruleBitcoin is the benchmark, not just a holding

For investors still new to crypto, Davis treats Bitcoin as the starting point and the dominant position. His own allocation follows the same logic. “In my personal portfolio, Bitcoin hovers anywhere between just under half of the portfolio to just over half,” he said, describing the crypto sleeve he balances with altcoin opportunities.

Those opportunities live on a short leash. “My rules from a portfolio management perspective when it comes to altcoins, is the altcoin needs to be outperforming Bitcoin to justify its allocation of the portfolio,” he said. When conditions are not right for altcoins to lead, he cools his positioning rather than accept the drag. “Otherwise, I’d rather just let the whole portfolio be Bitcoin because that’s what I want to own more of long term.”

The picksHyperliquid, privacy and protocols that earn

Davis says he lets the market tell him where to look, starting with whatever is outperforming Bitcoin, and uses internal tools at Bull Market Blueprint to track it. Hyperliquid has passed that test. “Hyperliquid has been in our portfolio off and on since 2025,” he said, adding that it has been held for most of this year. He pointed to Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR), a digital asset treasury company focused on owning HYPE, and said Stanley Druckenmiller shows up as an owner in one of his most recent 13F filings, which “validates the HYPE thesis from an institutional level for me.”

He is cautious about the stories that usually drive altcoin rallies. “Narratives have a funny way of being mirages in the crypto market,” he said. Money rotates fast, and long-term holders of many projects that rallied in recent months have gone nowhere over the years, in his telling.

Two themes do have his attention. “I’m excited about privacy coins because I think people are waking up to the fact that owning your money and owning your money privately is increasingly more important in an AI native world,” he said. Beyond privacy, he named layer ones and decentralized exchanges, and set the bar at revenue: protocols “that have an incentive and a reason for you to be a token holder, more so than they’re just part of a fluffy narrative, is what you really want to own, in my view.”

The wrappersSpot over treasury stocks, with one exception

Crypto equities give traditional investors a way in, and Davis says he likes them for that reason. He still would not use them as a substitute for the coins. Unless something prevents an investor from owning Bitcoin or a spot ETF, he argues, buying Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) for its Bitcoin makes less sense than buying Bitcoin and holding it in self-custody. He applies the same view to Bitmine and Ether. He concedes the treasury stocks may outperform the assets they accumulate, given how much more capital sits in traditional finance than in crypto.

The exception is how he trades them. He files crypto stocks under the thematic side of his portfolio, not the core. “Coinbase is not a hold for the past four years, in my opinion,” he said. “It’s a bit of a yo-yo stock.” Positions like that can run hard in a bull phase and sell off intensely in a bear market, so he keeps them to one or two at a time and watches sentiment and macro conditions for the exit.

The calendarWhy the fourth quarter of a midterm year matters

Davis calls 2026 “a series of head fakes.” Equities broadened out early in the year as international stocks and cyclicals led. Then, he said, fear around the Iran and US conflict pushed markets lower in March and April, with heavy de-risking by institutions and retail alike. When markets bottomed and returned to highs, tech left everything else behind.

That sets up the window he is watching now. In presidential cycle terms, he said, the fourth quarter of a midterm year “is actually arguably the best quarter of the entire presidential four year cycle,” and the run that starts there is known as the midterm miracle, covering the next three quarters. Crypto investors already favour the fourth quarter, he noted, though rising yields and a strong dollar make the macro backdrop less supportive for Bitcoin than usual.

His summary of the year is plain. “If you own crypto, you own AI related companies and you own quality and you’ve just held them for the year, you’ve done pretty good.”

The long viewFrom AI disruption to stimulus to hard assets

The thesis connecting his crypto sleeve to the rest of his book runs through AI. Davis argues AI has become the stock market itself, and expects the transition to be rough before it pays off. “I am of the belief that the world in 10 years from now, before it becomes better with AI, in some ways it gets more chaotic,” he said. “And I think that leads to unemployment. Unemployment, I think, leads to stimulus. And stimulus leads to the growth of Bitcoin and gold.”

That is why he swaps the bond sleeve of a classic 60/40 portfolio for what he calls the three Bs: businesses, bars and Bitcoin. It is also why he tells new investors to slow down. “In investing, it’s not necessarily a game of try, try, try,” he said. “It’s a game of think, think, then execute.” For readers building their own crypto allocation, the CCS Bitcoin news desk and the CCS Learn hub cover the ground underneath his rules.

Davis says he shares his thinking on YouTube as Luke Davis Investing and on X as @lukedavisBMB. The full conversation is on YouTube, alongside the rest of the CCS interview library.

For an investor who says he would happily let the whole portfolio become Bitcoin, the altcoins are on borrowed time until they prove otherwise.

This feature is based on an exclusive interview conducted by CCS with Luke Davis, Founder and Chief Market Strategist, at Bull Market Blueprint, on 5 October 2026.