How to Read a Crypto Call: Market Cap at Call, Best Multiple and Hit Rate

A call is a message that says “this token, now”. Telegram groups post hundreds of them a week, and almost none are ever checked afterwards. This guide explains the numbers we attach to every call posted in The Cabal, what each one tells you, and how to use them to judge a caller instead of trusting screenshots.

What counts as a call

When someone in The Cabal Telegram group posts a token address, we record a call: the token, the chain, the person who posted it and the exact time. From that moment the call has a fixed starting point that nobody can edit later. You can see every one of them, newest first, on the calls feed.

Market cap at call

The first number on a call is the market cap at the time of the call. We use market cap rather than price because token prices are not comparable: one token trades at $0.000004 and another at $2, but a $50K market cap means the same thing for both.

How we get it:

• If we price the call within three minutes of it being posted, we use the live price from DexScreener.
• Otherwise we look up the price in five-minute candles from GeckoTerminal for the token’s main pool, at the time of the call.
• Price times circulating supply gives the market cap.

Five-minute candles mean the starting market cap is close, not exact to the second. On a token that moves 30% in a minute, read it as “about this much”.

Current multiple vs best multiple

Every priced call shows two multiples:

• Now: current market cap ÷ market cap at call. Above 1x the token is up since the call; below 1x it is down.
• Best (ATH): the highest market cap since the call ÷ market cap at call. This is the best exit anyone following the call could have had.

You need both. A real example from this week: a Solana token called at about $164K market cap ran to about $685K, a best multiple of 4.2x. A day later it sat near $2K, a current multiple of about 0.01x. The call was good. Holding it was not. The best multiple tells you whether the caller found something; the current multiple tells you what happened to people who never sold.

Two rules keep the best multiple honest: it never drops below the current multiple, and once a call is priced it never drops below 1x (the call itself is the floor). We keep refreshing prices every ten minutes for calls younger than 30 days. After that the best multiple is frozen.

Why only first calls count

If five people post the same token, only the earliest post is the first call. Later posts still appear in the feed, but they do not count toward anyone’s record. Without this rule, the easiest way to look like a great caller would be to repost whatever is already pumping.

Hit rate: what a win is

A first call is a win when its best multiple reaches 2x or more. A caller’s hit rate is wins ÷ priced first calls. A 2x bar is deliberately simple: it is high enough that noise does not count, and low enough that a careful trader could have taken it.

How the leaderboard ranks callers

The leaderboard ranks callers by their average best multiple across their priced first calls, over the last 7 days, 30 days or all time. Ties go to the caller with more calls. You need at least three priced first calls in a window to be ranked, so a single lucky post cannot top the board.

How to judge a caller in one minute

1. Sample size first. Three calls is the minimum to be ranked, not proof of skill. Twenty calls tell you far more.
2. Hit rate and average together. One 40x call can lift an average on its own. A high average with a low hit rate means a few moonshots and many misses; a steady hit rate means the caller finds 2x setups often.
3. Look at the starting market caps. Calls at $5K market cap can multiply easily and die just as easily, often with little liquidity to sell into. The same multiple from a $500K start is harder to get.
4. Check the current multiples. If most of a caller’s tokens are near zero today, their calls work only for people who sell fast.
5. Open the profile. Each caller has a page with every call they made, and, when they trade through Cabal Trade, whether they bought their own calls.

What these numbers do not tell you

• The best multiple is a ceiling. Nobody sells exactly at the top.
• Market cap ignores liquidity. A token can show a 10x on a few thousand dollars of buys that you could never have sold into.
• Calls we cannot price after three tries (no pool, no candles) are left out of the public feed and the stats.
• A call is a post in a chat group, not advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy anything.

Get the raw data

Every number in this post comes from a public dataset you can download. The Cabal Calls dataset has one row per call, with the market cap at call, current and best market caps, both multiples and the first-call flag, as CSV or JSON. Use it to run your own numbers on any caller.