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Metrics·June 14, 2026·7 min read

Conviction and holding time: patience as a metric

Metricsvideo © Jakub Zerdzicki
Measure conviction

Conviction and holding time: patience as a metric

Most traders overestimate their own patience. On-chain data does not. Holding time — measured directly from transaction timestamps — is one of the most behaviorally informative numbers available.

How holding time is computed

From the timing family:

  • Average hold — mean time between an asset's first inflow and its sale.
  • Median hold — robust to outlier trades that drag the mean.
  • Sell pressure decay — how quickly the wallet exits positions after buying.
  • Re-buy persistence — after selling, does it come back to the same asset?

Conviction as a composite

Conviction is not just patience. It combines:

  • Holding length — patience.
  • Position growth — building up rather than just parking.
  • Drawdown tolerance — not dumping on a 20% drop.
  • Re-entry — re-buying after a deliberate exit signals structural belief, not momentum.

A high-conviction wallet behaves as if it believes in the asset regardless of short-term noise.

What low conviction reveals

Rapid in-and-out, heavy sell pressure after pumps, and no re-entry usually mean momentum trading or speculation. That is not inherently bad — but it is a different risk profile, and partnering or lending against such behavior carries different expectations.

The deterministic bottom line

Every SIGBOT conviction output cites the holding windows and sell patterns that produced it. Nothing about patience is guessed from a single trade.

[See the conviction metrics →](/how-it-works)

put it into practice
Analyze a real wallet

Holding time is one of the most predictive on-chain behaviors. Here is how conviction is measured from holding windows, sell pressure and re-buy patterns.

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