Quick question: why does price always seem to wick down right before it goes exactly where you thought it would?

You're not imagining it. And no, the market isn't "out to get you" personally — but it is absolutely designed to find the easiest liquidity available, and that's usually sitting right where everyone put their stop-loss.
Here's the mechanic. When a lot of traders open longs around a similar price, they all place stops in roughly the same place — just below the last swing low, or just under a round number like $64,000. That cluster of stop orders is, functionally, a pile of sell orders waiting to be triggered. For a large player trying to fill a big position, that cluster is the cheapest place to source liquidity. Push price down into it, the stops fire, sellers do the work for you, and price can snap right back up once that supply is exhausted. That snap-back is the wick.
Today's a decent live example. BTC dipped to $64,060, down under 1% on the day — nothing dramatic. But look at who got liquidated in that move: $45.3M total, and 92.5% of it was long positions. ETH told the same story — $21.6M liquidated, 84% longs. That's a heavily lopsided ratio for what was, by the numbers, a genuinely routine day — liquidation volume sat at just 0.89x BTC's 7-day average and a mere 0.20x its 30-day peak. In plain terms: the market didn't need a crash to clear out longs. It just needed to touch the level where their stops were sitting.
That's the tell that separates a stop hunt from an actual trend change. A real breakdown usually liquidates both sides messily as the market repriced. A clean hunt liquidates one side disproportionately, on modest volatility, then the pressure that caused the dip disappears because the thing driving the sell orders — the stops — is gone.
So where do stops "usually sit"? Just past the obvious: the last visible low, a round number, or right below a level everyone's watching on the chart. Which is exactly why the most crowded, most talked-about level is often the first one that gets swept — not because the market is smart, but because that's where the liquidity is concentrated.

Next time you see a fast wick with no real news behind it, check the long/short liquidation split before assuming the trend flipped. Today's numbers are a clean example of what that pattern actually looks like in real time.
#Liquidations $BTC $ETH