Polkadot indicator? Data shows Ethereum price follows it to the DOT

Anyone who's been in the game since 2017 will recall the heated discussions revolving around the Ether to Bitcoin flippening and the same commotion was caused by Bitcoin Cash and EOS flipping top blockchains as they moved into the top-5.Now traders' attention has shifted to Polkadot as the network is currently ranked top-5 cryptocurrency by market capitalization and it seems that its ascension to the top came out of the blue.

DOT's price action seems to be somehow anticipating Ether's by 15 minutes to 4 hours.

Small cap altcoins mimic Ether and Bitcoin price actionUsually there is a very high intraday performance resemblance between Ether and its indirect competitors that focus on governance, oracles, and interoperability.

Sometimes one of these altcoins anticipates Ether movements.

While a single $2 million sell order might impact Tezos' $230 million weekly transparent liquidity, a $20 million sell order for Ether is a non-event as its market cap hovers around $8 billion.

Again, numerous factors could be behind those predictive Ether movements on smaller cryptocurrencies, and some will not be replicated, thus creating false alerts.

For starters, both Ether and DOT had been making new local highs in early September.

During this time DOT began a strong rally two hours ahead of Ether, and it also initiated its trend reversal earlier than Ether.

Even though their proportional stake in Ether is likely higher, its price impact could be deemed irrelevant considering its liquidity.

The same can be said for the many false positives and opposing movements that happened exclusively to DOT that were not replicated by Ether.