What exactly is the so-called “big player” we keep talking about?
After trading for a long time, you realize that the word “big player” is especially handy.
If it goes up, the big player is pumping the price. If it goes down, the big player is shaking out weak hands. If it moves sideways, the big player is accumulating. If you just got stopped out and then it rises, the big player has precisely taken your money.
It feels as if there is a person sitting on the other side of the screen, someone who knows everyone’s positions and has already arranged the next candlestick. Every day we stare at the market, just trying to guess what he plans to do next.
But in this imagined picture, several completely different things get mixed together: wealthy big players, institutional funds, market makers, real market manipulators, and the market’s own trading mechanisms.
Calling them all “big players” makes things easy to explain, but it can cost you when you trade.
First, let’s be clear: “庄家” and “主力” are both commonly used market terms, and neither has a strict definition that applies in every situation.
The difference between controlling players and major market participants
When people say “庄家,” they usually mean one party or a group of connected sources of capital holding a large share of the tradable supply. They can influence supply and demand to some extent, move prices, and may even manipulate the market through coordinated messaging and trading.
“主力” is a broader term. Anyone with enough capital to affect the market may be called one. But being able to influence a price is a long way from being able to control it over the long term.
A fund reducing its holdings can push down the price of a stock. That doesn’t mean it’s also behind every subsequent rebound and pullback.
Buying a lot doesn’t mean you’re right; having a lot of money doesn’t mean you’re immune to risk controls, redemption pressure, or losses.
Large investors can also be caught off guard by other large investors.
To understand these players, you also need to look at what they’re trading.
If ownership of a small-cap coin is highly concentrated and the order book is thin, a small number of accounts may have a substantial impact on the price. This kind of market is indeed closer to what many people imagine when they think of a market controlled by a “庄家.”
But a small market cap alone isn’t evidence of manipulation. You still need to look at the actual distribution of holdings, connected accounts, whether trades are genuine, and how much of the buy and sell orders can actually be executed.
With SPY or QQQ, the trading structure is much more complex.
ETF shares, constituent stocks, index futures, options, and creation, redemption, and arbitrage mechanisms link multiple markets together. When prices diverge, traders try to profit from the difference. Anyone trying to control a market like this over the long term would have to contend with a large number of forces trading in different directions.
An individual stock like Google is also affected by earnings reports, institutional portfolio rebalancing, index funds, company buybacks, and other factors. A sharp drop may reflect changing earnings expectations, fund selling, and derivatives hedging all at once. Attributing all of these trades to one “major player’s” plan leaves out a lot of important information.
BTC and ETH trade on multiple platforms, and spot and derivatives markets influence each other too. Large holders can affect local price action, and leverage can amplify volatility, but no one can use capital alone to guarantee that the entire market will always move as they want.
At the same time, some traders are buying spot while others are shorting futures. Even the same institution may be doing both.
If it’s profiting from the spread on both sides, you might see it buying spot and declare that “the big players are bullish,” when it may not be betting on a rise at all.
Next, let’s talk about a role that often gets blamed: the market maker.
A market maker’s basic job is to provide bid and ask quotes, facilitate trades, and manage inventory and hedging risk. It may earn revenue from the bid-ask spread, or it may lose money when the market moves suddenly or its inventory becomes imbalanced.
For example, if customers keep selling assets to it, its inventory grows. It may adjust its quotes or sell in other markets to hedge. Options market makers also adjust their positions in related assets as their risk exposure changes.
These trades may affect prices, but seeing a market maker sell isn’t enough to conclude that it’s plotting a crash.
Of course, calling yourself a “market maker” doesn’t mean your conduct is necessarily legitimate.
In October 2024, the SEC sued several companies that called themselves market makers, along with associated individuals, accusing them of creating fake trading volume and manipulating some crypto-asset markets. This was a specific case involving an investigation and allegations; it shouldn’t be generalized into “all market makers are manipulating the market.”
So what really matters is assessing the specific conduct. Providing quotes and hedging risk are different from creating the appearance of market activity through fake trades.
Now let’s return to the moment that most easily convinces people that a “庄家” is at work:
The price has just broken below the previous low, and your stop-loss is triggered. A few minutes later, it climbs back up.
It’s hard not to feel angry in that moment: “How could that timing be so perfect?”
But you’re not the only one watching that previous low.
Many traders may have bought around the same area and placed their stop-losses at similar levels. Once the price falls below it, stop-market orders are triggered one after another, adding to the selling. If some leveraged long positions also meet the conditions for liquidation, selling pressure may build further.
Liquidations and stop-losses
It’s important to distinguish between stop-losses and liquidations: they’re two separate mechanisms. Take Binance futures, for example. Liquidation depends on the mark price and margin conditions, so a single wick on a candlestick chart based on regular trade prices isn’t enough to determine whether all positions would be liquidated.
When sell orders keep coming in and there aren’t many buyers ready to take the other side, the price can fall quickly. Once those sell orders have been absorbed and buying picks up again, the price may rebound.
This process can happen even without anyone coordinating it.
Some traders may also anticipate that there are many orders around these levels and trade around them deliberately. But going from “someone might take advantage of this setup” to “someone definitely arranged this wick in advance” requires a lot more evidence.
Candlesticks can show you where trades took place. Their shape alone makes it difficult to determine who was trading, what their intentions were, or whether they were acting together.
That’s also the problem with seeing a long lower wick and declaring that big players are accumulating, or seeing a high-volume drop and declaring that they’re distributing.
Every trade has a buyer and a seller. Higher volume shows that trading is active; by itself, it doesn’t prove that either side has better information, let alone that someone is positioning for what comes next.
For ordinary traders, studying the behavior of large players can be useful, but you need to turn speculation into judgments that can be tested.
For example, say you think the price may rebound after breaking below the previous low. Keep observing: Can it reclaim that level? Can it hold above it? When the price pulls back again, is there still buying support?
If the price stays low for a long time after breaking down, and any rebound fails to reclaim the former level, you should seriously consider the possibility that the decline will continue.
A quick recovery followed by a retest that holds adds evidence that “this breakout has failed.” It still doesn’t guarantee that the next move will be up.
These observations don’t require you to know who the big player is, but they can help you decide whether the reasoning behind your trade still holds.
The moment to be most wary of the “big players are shaking out weak hands” explanation is when it shows up.
Before entering a trade, your plan may be clear: if the price breaks below a certain level, your thesis is wrong.
Then it actually falls to that level, and you start thinking: “That support is so obvious—the big players must be deliberately pushing the price down. I’ll wait a little longer.”
Sometimes you need to wait a little longer
It falls further, and you come up with another explanation: “The harder they shake people out, the higher it’ll go afterward.”
At this point, “the big players” have already given you a reason to discard your original exit condition.
A losing trade may simply be a normal case of getting it wrong. But if every move against you can be explained away as a shakeout, your thesis never has to admit it was wrong.
I think studying “big players” should ultimately help us answer three practical questions: How are the market’s holdings and liquidity distributed? Which trading mechanisms could amplify volatility? What would indicate that we need to revise our judgment?
As for whether someone on the other side of the screen is actually watching you, often, we just don’t know.
Not knowing who’s selling doesn’t stop you from managing your position size.
Not knowing where the next candlestick will go doesn’t stop you from deciding in advance how much you’re willing to lose on this trade.
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