We investigate Fox's trapezoidal conjecture for alternating links. We show that it holds for diagrammatic Murasugi sums of special alternating links, where all sums involved have length less than three (which includes diagrammatic plumbing). It also holds for links containing a large twist region, which we call twist-concentrated. Furthermore, we show some weaker inequalities between consecutive coefficients of the Alexander polynomial of an alternating 3-braid closure, and extend this to arbitrary alternating links. We then study an extension of the trapezoidal conjecture due to Hirasawa and Murasugi, which states that the stable length of the Alexander polynomial of an alternating link can be bounded from above using the signature. We estabilish this and determine when equality holds for diagrammatic Murasugi sums of special alternating knots where each sum has length less than three, and also for twist-concentrated 3-braids. Finally, we study the behavior of the Hirasawa-Murasugi inequality under concordance.