When the market for these wild altcoins is chaotic and hard to read, try looking at it from a different angle: don’t focus solely on going long—pay more attention to opportunities to go short.
Big players have always had more ways to make money than simply pumping prices. If there are very few short positions in the market, and a pump won’t trigger many liquidations, they can instead drive prices up sharply and trap retail traders who chase the rally at the top. They can profit that way too. The key is to judge whether the rally has genuine momentum to continue.
Here are a few examples. $AIN surged 20-fold in one go, but the total liquidation volume was unbelievably low. The price shot up rapidly rather than grinding higher gradually. $AGT surged fourfold in a single day, yet liquidations totaled only around $1 million. This suggests that few people in the market dared to go short at the time; everyone was inclined to chase longs. This kind of pump is essentially more about luring people into going long and trapping them, rather than reflecting a genuine bullish trend.
$JCT follows the same logic. As the price plunged, retail traders kept jumping in to buy the dip and catch the falling knife, leaving a large number of long positions trapped. As long as those traders stubbornly hold on instead of cutting their losses, big players have no real incentive to pump the price and bail them out. Naturally, it’s hard for the market to mount a meaningful rebound.
In short: big players don’t necessarily need prices to rise to make a profit. When market conditions are good, they make a little more; when conditions are poor, they make a little less. As long as retail positions are heavily skewed to one side, big players have room to play the market.
Big players have always had more ways to make money than simply pumping prices. If there are very few short positions in the market, and a pump won’t trigger many liquidations, they can instead drive prices up sharply and trap retail traders who chase the rally at the top. They can profit that way too. The key is to judge whether the rally has genuine momentum to continue.
Here are a few examples. $AIN surged 20-fold in one go, but the total liquidation volume was unbelievably low. The price shot up rapidly rather than grinding higher gradually. $AGT surged fourfold in a single day, yet liquidations totaled only around $1 million. This suggests that few people in the market dared to go short at the time; everyone was inclined to chase longs. This kind of pump is essentially more about luring people into going long and trapping them, rather than reflecting a genuine bullish trend.
$JCT follows the same logic. As the price plunged, retail traders kept jumping in to buy the dip and catch the falling knife, leaving a large number of long positions trapped. As long as those traders stubbornly hold on instead of cutting their losses, big players have no real incentive to pump the price and bail them out. Naturally, it’s hard for the market to mount a meaningful rebound.
In short: big players don’t necessarily need prices to rise to make a profit. When market conditions are good, they make a little more; when conditions are poor, they make a little less. As long as retail positions are heavily skewed to one side, big players have room to play the market.