Gate Research Institute: In August, the overall risk assets increased, and the trend momentum strategy performed steadily

Gate Research Institute released the August 2026 cryptocurrency and TradFi quantitative report. BTC and ETH rose approximately 25.1% and 32.6% respectively during the month. Gate contract data shows that the open interest amount for BTC increased from about $4.02 billion to $4.38 billion, while ETH rose from about $2.46 billion to $2.75 billion, with increases of approximately 9% and 12.1% respectively.

The funding rates for both remained moderately positive most of the time, with long positions dominating the number of accounts, but the active trading long-short ratio was below 1. The TradFi market also rose in sync, with NAS100 increasing about 4.2% during the month, outperforming US500 and US30, while large tech stocks showed a divergence in trends.

The report compared four models: moving average trends, trend momentum, Donchian breakout, and RSI mean reversion. Backtesting results showed that the 100-day moving average and 20-day price momentum strategies achieved positive cumulative returns on BTC, ETH, US500, and NAS100, with a median Sharpe ratio of 0.64 and a median maximum drawdown of 8.71%. The report includes Gate TradFi's US500 and NAS100 in cross-asset observations and evaluates market heat by combining Gate contract long-short ratios, funding rates, and open interest data. The execution over the next one to three months will focus on trend confirmation, volatility rebalancing, leverage limits, and cooling off abnormal liquidations.