One terminal for crypto and stocks.

A single lens for two markets

For most of the last decade, cryptocurrency and the stock market lived in separate worlds. Crypto traders watched order books at three in the morning; equity investors checked their portfolios after the closing bell. Today that separation makes less and less sense. The same person who owns an S&P 500 index fund in a retirement account increasingly also holds Bitcoin in a wallet, and the macroeconomic forces that move one market — interest rates, liquidity, risk appetite, regulation — routinely move the other.

Market Capitalize exists to give that modern, multi-asset investor a single, honest lens. On one site you can pull a live quote for any of hundreds of cryptocurrencies, check the price and 52-week range of a major US-listed company, gauge overall market sentiment, and run the same calculators against either asset class. The goal is not to tell you what to buy. It is to present accurate, well-sourced data and the context you need to interpret it for yourself.

That last point matters, because the internet is awash in financial data that is stale, fabricated, or quietly wrong. Our guiding rule is simple and absolute: every number you see is either a real, sourced value or it is not shown at all. We never pad a table with zeros, fill a gap with a dash, or invent a figure to make a page look complete. If a data point is missing, the space is simply empty — and that emptiness is itself honest information.

How to read a crypto quote

A cryptocurrency quote looks simple — a name, a ticker, and a price — but the most useful information sits in the numbers around the price. When you open a coin page on Market Capitalize, here is what each field actually tells you.

Price

The price is the most recent trade value, expressed in US dollars. For crypto this is a global, 24-hour figure aggregated across exchanges, so it never "closes." Because crypto trades continuously, the price you see at noon and the price at midnight are equally live; there is no official daily close the way there is for a stock.

Market capitalisation

Market cap is the price multiplied by the circulating supply. It is the single most important number for comparing two coins, because price alone is meaningless without supply. A token priced at $0.50 with 100 billion coins in circulation is far larger than a token priced at $500 with one million coins. Ranking by market cap, not by price, is how you understand a coin's real size in the market.

Circulating, total and max supply

Circulating supply is the number of coins available to the market right now. Max supply is the hard ceiling, if one exists — Bitcoin's famous 21 million, for example. The gap between the two matters: if a large share of a token's eventual supply has not yet entered circulation, future unlocks can dilute holders even if demand stays constant. We show circulating and max supply whenever the provider reports them, and leave the field blank when it does not.

24-hour volume

Volume is the dollar value traded over the past 24 hours. It is a proxy for liquidity — how easily you could enter or exit a position without moving the price. A coin with a large market cap but thin volume can be surprisingly hard to sell in size. Always read volume alongside market cap, never in isolation.

Percentage changes and all-time high

The 1-hour, 24-hour, 7-day and 30-day percentages show momentum over different windows. The all-time high (ATH) and the distance from it tell you where the asset sits in its own history. A coin trading 80% below its ATH is not automatically "cheap" — it may simply reflect that the previous peak was driven by mania. Use these figures as context, not as a buy or sell signal.

How to read a stock quote

US equities follow different conventions from crypto, shaped by regulated exchanges and fixed trading hours. A stock page on Market Capitalize surfaces the fields professionals look at first.

Last price and previous close

The last price is the most recent trade during market hours. The previous close is the official closing price from the prior session — the anchor against which the day's change is measured. The dollar change and percentage change you see compare the latest price to that previous close, which is why a stock can show a move before the regular session even opens, on pre-market activity.

Day's range and 52-week range

The day's range is the low and high printed so far in the current session. The 52-week range is the lowest and highest price over the trailing year. Together they tell you whether today's move is ordinary noise or an unusual break-out, and where the current price sits within its longer-term band. A stock pinned near its 52-week high behaves very differently, psychologically and technically, from one scraping its 52-week low.

Volume

As with crypto, volume measures how many shares changed hands. Unusually high volume on a big move signals conviction; a large move on thin volume is easier to reverse. Volume is the context that turns a price change into a story.

Market capitalisation across asset classes

Market capitalisation is the rare concept that translates cleanly between crypto and equities, which makes it the natural bridge for a multi-asset investor — and the reason it sits in our name.

For a stock, market cap is the share price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. It represents the total value the market places on the company's equity. Analysts split it into bands — large-cap, mid-cap and small-cap — because companies of different sizes tend to behave differently in terms of growth, stability and risk.

For a cryptocurrency, market cap is the price multiplied by circulating supply, as described above. The analogy is useful but imperfect. A company's shares outstanding is a well-defined, audited number; a token's circulating supply can be fuzzier, affected by lost coins, locked treasury holdings and scheduled unlocks. There is also the concept of fully-diluted valuation — what the market cap would be if every possible token were already circulating — which can dwarf the current figure for young projects.

The practical takeaway: never compare two assets by price tag alone. A four-figure price means nothing without knowing how many units exist. Market cap is the great equaliser, and reading it correctly is the first habit of a disciplined investor.

Liquidity, spreads and slippage

Of all the concepts that separate confident investors from anxious ones, liquidity is the most underrated. Liquidity is simply how easily you can convert an asset into cash — or cash into an asset — without moving the price against yourself. A deep, liquid market absorbs your order quietly; a thin, illiquid one lurches when you try to trade size. The headline price you see on any quote is only meaningful if there is real liquidity behind it.

The bid-ask spread

Every tradable asset has two prices at any instant: the highest price a buyer is currently willing to pay (the bid) and the lowest price a seller will accept (the ask). The gap between them is the spread, and it is a direct, if hidden, cost of trading. For the largest cryptocurrencies and the most heavily-traded US stocks, the spread is a fraction of a percent and barely worth a thought. For a small-cap stock or a low-volume token, the spread can be wide enough to put you immediately underwater the moment you buy — you would need the price to rise just to break even on the round trip.

The single figure shown on a quote page, here or anywhere, is typically the last traded price or a midpoint. It does not reveal the spread, and it certainly does not promise that you could transact a large amount at that exact level. This is one reason we pair every price with 24-hour volume on crypto and share volume on stocks: volume is your best freely-available proxy for whether a market is liquid enough to take you seriously.

Slippage and market depth

Slippage is the difference between the price you expected and the price you actually got. It grows with the size of your order relative to the available liquidity. Imagine an order book where only a handful of coins are offered at the quoted ask, more a little higher, and still more higher again. A small buy fills at the quote; a large buy "walks the book," consuming each successively worse level until it is filled, at an average price well above where it started. The same mechanism works in reverse when you sell into thin demand.

Market depth — the quantity available to buy and sell at each price level — is what determines how much slippage a given order will suffer. Aggregated data sites like this one do not show full order-book depth; for that you must look at your trading venue directly. The practical lesson is humility: a chart can look identical for a deeply liquid asset and a barely-traded one, but the experience of actually trading them is worlds apart.

Reading charts and sparklines responsibly

A price chart is one of the most information-dense objects in finance and one of the easiest to misread. Across Market Capitalize you will see two kinds: compact sparklines in tables, which trace the rough shape of recent movement in a few dozen pixels, and larger price charts on individual coin and ticker pages. Both are designed to be honest about what they are — and both deserve to be read with a critical eye.

What a sparkline can and cannot tell you

A sparkline is a thumbnail. Its job is to answer a single question at a glance: is this asset broadly rising, falling or chopping sideways over the window shown? Our crypto sparklines use seven days of daily closing data from Binance; our stock charts use months of session closes from Nasdaq. A sparkline deliberately omits the axis labels, the exact values and the intermediate volatility, because cramming those into a tiny space would mislead more than it informs. Use it for shape, not for precision. When you want the actual numbers, open the full page.

The tyranny of the y-axis

The most common way a chart deceives — even an entirely accurate one — is through the scale of its vertical axis. A chart that starts its y-axis near the price rather than at zero exaggerates every wiggle; the same data plotted from zero can look almost flat. Neither is "wrong," but they tell very different emotional stories. Whenever you read a chart, glance at the axis before you react to the slope. A terrifying cliff and a gentle slope are often the same data dressed differently.

Timeframe is everything

An asset can be down sharply on the day, up over the month, and down again over the year — all true simultaneously. A seven-day crypto sparkline says nothing about the multi-year trend; a six-month stock chart says nothing about today's session. Before you draw a conclusion, make sure the window you are looking at matches the question you are asking. Much of the panic and euphoria on financial social media comes from people reacting to a chart whose timeframe does not fit their actual holding period.

Finally, remember the universal disclaimer that applies to every chart ever drawn: past movement is a record, not a prediction. A line that has gone up for six months has exactly the same obligation to keep going up as a coin flip that has landed heads six times — which is to say, none at all.

Volatility, risk and position sizing

Volatility is the degree to which an asset's price swings over time. It is not the same thing as risk, but the two are closely related, and crypto and equities sit at very different points on the spectrum.

Broad equity indices are relatively stable: a 2% move in the S&P 500 is a notable day. Individual stocks swing more, especially around earnings. Cryptocurrencies are more volatile still — double-digit daily moves are routine, and even large-cap coins can halve or double over a few months. Higher volatility means larger potential gains and larger potential losses; it is a feature of the asset class, not a flaw to be ignored.

Why position sizing matters more than picking

Experienced investors will tell you that how much you allocate to a position usually matters more than which position you pick. A great idea sized too large can wipe out an account on a normal drawdown; a mediocre idea sized sensibly is survivable. This is why our tools include a position-size calculator and a risk/reward calculator — they help you express a view in a way that respects your own tolerance for loss.

A common framework is to risk only a small, fixed percentage of a portfolio on any single idea, so that no one outcome is catastrophic. The exact number is personal, and depends on your goals, time horizon and temperament. The point is to decide it deliberately, in advance, rather than in the heat of a green or red candle.

The unforgiving maths of drawdowns

There is a quirk of arithmetic that every investor should internalise, because it explains why avoiding large losses matters so much more than capturing large gains. Losses and the gains required to recover them are not symmetrical. A 10% loss needs an 11% gain to get back to even. A 25% loss needs a 33% gain. A 50% loss needs a 100% gain — you must double your remaining money simply to return to where you started. And an 80% drawdown, the kind not unusual in crypto bear markets, requires a 400% gain to recover.

This asymmetry is the mathematical heart of risk management. It is why seasoned investors obsess over limiting downside rather than maximising upside, and why position sizing — keeping any single loss small enough to recover from — is not timidity but arithmetic. It is also why leverage, which amplifies both directions, is so dangerous in volatile assets: a moderately bad day can trigger a loss from which recovery is mathematically punishing or, with borrowed money, impossible.

The first job of an investor is not to maximise returns. It is to stay in the game long enough for good decisions to compound.

Sentiment and the Fear & Greed Index

Prices are set by people, and people are emotional. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index, published by Alternative.me and shown across Market Capitalize, distils that emotion into a single number from 0 (extreme fear) to 100 (extreme greed). It blends signals such as volatility, momentum, volume, social media activity and survey data.

The index is best read as a contrarian thermometer rather than a timing tool. Extreme fear can indicate that sellers are exhausted and the market is oversold; extreme greed can warn that optimism has run ahead of fundamentals. Neither is a guarantee — markets can stay fearful or greedy for a long time. But knowing where collective emotion sits helps you check your own. When the index is screaming greed and you feel an urge to chase, that is precisely the moment to slow down.

We also show a 30-day history of the index so you can see the trajectory, not just today's reading. A market moving from fear toward greed tells a different story from one sliding the other way, even at the same absolute level.

Where our numbers come from

Trust in market data depends entirely on knowing its source. We name ours plainly and never present data we cannot stand behind.

• Cryptocurrency prices, market caps, supply and rankings come from CoinPaprika, which aggregates across major exchanges.
• Seven-day crypto price history (the sparklines on our tables and coin pages) is sourced from Binance daily close data.
• The Crypto Fear & Greed Index is published by Alternative.me.
• US stock quotes, ranges, volume and price history come from Nasdaq.

We cache responses for short windows — roughly a minute for crypto quotes, a couple of minutes for stocks, and about ten minutes for sentiment — to keep pages fast and to respect each provider's rate limits. Every surface displays when its data was last refreshed. If a live feed is temporarily unreachable, we fall back to the last good values and label them clearly as cached, rather than showing a broken or blank page.

All of this data may be delayed relative to the exchanges themselves, and it is provided for information only. It is not execution-grade market data and should never be used as the sole basis for a trade. For our complete approach, including how we handle corrections, see our Methodology and Editorial Guidelines pages.

Crypto vs. stocks: the differences that matter

Tracking both asset classes in one place is convenient, but they are genuinely different instruments. Understanding the differences keeps you from applying stock-market instincts to crypto, or vice versa.

Perhaps the most important practical difference is custody. When you hold a stock, a regulated broker maintains the record and there are well-established protections if something goes wrong. When you self-custody crypto, you alone hold the keys — which means total control, but also total responsibility. Lost keys mean lost coins, with no help desk to call.

Building a multi-asset view

Diversification is the idea that holding assets which do not move in perfect lockstep reduces the overall volatility of a portfolio without necessarily reducing its expected return. It is one of the few genuinely free lunches in investing — and it is the strategic reason to watch crypto and equities together.

The relationship between the two shifts over time. There have been stretches when Bitcoin traded almost like a high-beta tech stock, rising and falling with the Nasdaq, and other stretches when it moved on its own narrative entirely. Watching both markets side by side helps you see when correlations tighten — which is exactly when the diversification benefit of holding both shrinks.

None of this implies any particular allocation is right for you. A young investor with decades ahead and a high tolerance for swings will think differently from someone preserving capital near retirement. The value of a multi-asset dashboard is not that it picks an allocation, but that it lets you monitor and rebalance whatever allocation you have chosen, with the same quality of data on both sides.

Getting the most from Market Capitalize

Everything on this site is organised around a single idea: give you accurate, well-sourced numbers and the context to interpret them, then get out of your way. Here is how the pieces fit together, and how to move between them.

Start with the live data surfaces

The cryptocurrency prices page lists hundreds of coins ranked by market cap, each linking to a detailed page with price, supply, volume, percentage moves and a seven-day chart. The stocks hub brings together major US-listed companies and index proxies, while the full ticker directory lets you find any covered symbol alphabetically. Every one of these pages obeys the same rule: real values or nothing, with a visible timestamp so you always know how fresh the data is.

Run the numbers before you act on them

Reading a quote tells you where an asset is; our free investor tools help you reason about what a decision would actually mean. The position-size and risk/reward calculators turn a vague sense of risk into a concrete number of shares or coins. The compound-interest and dollar-cost-averaging tools project how a disciplined plan plays out over years. The crypto and stock return calculators let you stress-test an idea against real assumptions rather than wishful ones. None of these tools collect your data or require an account — they run entirely in your browser.

Build the habit of checking the source

The single most valuable habit this site can encourage is source-awareness. Before you trust any figure — here or anywhere — ask where it came from, when it was last updated, and what its limits are. We make that easy by naming our providers on every relevant page and timestamping every feed. Carry that same scepticism to the rest of the financial internet, and you will already be ahead of most of the noise.

Common mistakes when reading market data

Even good data leads to bad decisions when it is read carelessly. A few recurring traps:

• Confusing price with value. A low unit price does not make an asset cheap, and a high one does not make it expensive. Always think in market cap.
• Ignoring liquidity. A tempting chart on an asset with almost no volume can be a trap; you may not be able to exit at the price you see.
• Anchoring to the all-time high. "Down 70% from its peak" is a fact, not a forecast. The peak may never return.
• Chasing the biggest mover. Today's top gainer is often tomorrow's top loser. Outsized one-day moves usually mean outsized risk.
• Treating delayed data as live. Aggregated quotes lag the exchanges. For anything time-sensitive, confirm on your trading venue.
• Mistaking confidence for accuracy. A precise-looking number is not necessarily a correct one. Knowing the source — and its limits — matters more than the decimal places.
• Reading a chart without checking its axis or timeframe. The same data can look calm or terrifying depending on how it is scaled and how wide a window you choose. Always orient yourself before reacting.
• Confusing volume with conviction in isolation. High volume confirms interest, but a single day of heavy trading around news can be noise rather than a durable trend. Read it alongside price and context.
• Comparing nominal returns across time without adjusting for inflation. A gain that does not beat the erosion of purchasing power is not really a gain. This is exactly what our inflation calculator is for.
• Forgetting the costs. Spreads, fees, slippage and taxes all sit between the price on the screen and the money in your account. A headline return is always gross; what matters is what you keep.

The thread running through all of these is the same: the number on the screen is the beginning of the analysis, not the end of it. A figure becomes useful only once you know its source, its scale, its timeframe and its cost. Treat every quote as a question to investigate rather than an answer to act on, and the most common — and most expensive — mistakes simply stop happening.

A short glossary

• Market cap — total market value of an asset (price × supply or shares).
• Circulating supply — units of a coin currently available to trade.
• Max supply — the hard ceiling on how many units of a coin can ever exist, where one is defined.
• Volume — value traded over a period; a proxy for liquidity.
• Liquidity — how easily an asset can be bought or sold without moving its price.
• Bid-ask spread — the gap between the highest buy price and lowest sell price; a hidden cost of trading.
• Slippage — the difference between the price you expected and the price you actually got.
• ATH — all-time high, the highest price an asset has ever reached.
• Volatility — the size and frequency of price swings.
• Drawdown — the decline from a peak to a subsequent low, usually expressed as a percentage.
• Previous close — a stock's official closing price from the prior session.
• 52-week range — the lowest and highest price over the trailing year.
• Fully-diluted valuation — market cap if all possible units existed.
• Float — the portion of supply that is actually free to trade, excluding locked or restricted holdings.
• Index proxy — a tradable ETF used to approximate a benchmark index.
• Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) — investing a fixed amount at regular intervals regardless of price.
• Correlation — the degree to which two assets tend to move together; central to diversification.

Frequently asked questions