BESAFE

The initial Pump: 🚀🚀Consider a coin X rising to $10 million market cap just in few days rising from $1 million valuation. Lets say the value per coin @$10 million valuation is $10 for easy understand. The coin X has decent fundamentals, not too great not to bad. Now a whale, with $100 million in his wallet, wants to pump it up to have some gains. He started pumping it from $10 to $20, he will need around $2 milllion and rest the retailers will do. His average buying to pump will be around $13-$14.
Resistance and Re-Pump: 👊🚀Then their comes resistance and he will pump it again to $25-$30. His average will be around $18-$19. The momentum for the coin will pick up and other small traders will push it up, it will take the price to $45-$50 with whale intermittently pumping it on the resistance. Now the whale will be having around $7-8 million worth of coins (14-16% of supply) at an average price around $25-$26. But if he sells them all at once, the price of the coin will collapse and he will eventually end up on loss.
Retailer Entry: 😁😁Now imagine a retailer who have done a diligent research and concludes that coin is fundamentally not that strong and it is highly overvalued decides to short it as it has already moved from $1 to $50 (50x) with 10x leverage. The situation is that the whale had unlimited amount of money to always push the price of the coin, while the retailer is having limited resources to short it.
Retailer Liquidation: 😭🥺For the whale to not to loose money, he will have to sell the coins slowly keeping the price at around $45-$50. Consider the perfect situation for the retailer, the momentum is decreasing (the whale is slowly offloading), prices are coming down. But then after unloading 20% of whales supply slowly, say the price drops down to $35-$10. The whale will buy again increasing his average price (not considering the profits taken). He will buy to break the resistance of $50 other retailers will join and will push it's price to $65-$70 (remember at this price the total market cap is only $65-70 million), the whale will still be holding supply of around 15-18%. The retailer is already liquidated at this time. Believing the weak fundamentals, usually retailers double down the shorts to regain their losses.
Social Media Buzz: 💻💰💵At this point their will be a buzz on the social media, some paid PR's too, the hype will be creating taking it's price to $100-$120, even more, meanwhile the whale is offloading it's assets, pumping it up whenever is required, liquidating the shorts of retailers. And once he had 3x-5x profits, he will eventually place a huge short before dumping it in one go. The greedy retailers kept waiting for their pre calculated 7x-8x gains, hoping the price will go up. In the end the whale will be having 10x-12x of his initial investment. Most of the retailers will end up on a loss, few of them will be in profit, the ones who kept taking profit in between and are not too greedy.

Other Whales Shorting: 🐳Then the question is why do other whales do not short it? Considering the small market cap, to short a coin, it requires a lots of liquidity, lots of retailers to buy it in the end. Say a whale put a short order, the prices will fall but since the other whale already controls 20% of supply, the overall supply will reduce drastically eventually creating the buying pressure, and then the other whale will again pump it. The one shorting it might end up with a small profit or might be at a loss, so they do not take that much of risk for small profits!!

Why not pump all the time?: 🤔Then why do whales don’t do it all the time? Even for the whales, to work this out, they require a bullish overall momentum in the altcoins. And the bullish momentum in alts comes once or twice every 4 years. In this altseason many such scenerios gonna happen.

As for the coins with high market caps, it is tough for one whale to manipulate the entire cycle of that coin as there are fear of always a bigger player there. So whales don’t take much risk in those.

Conclusion: The conclusion is that the ultimate power belongs to the whales, it doesn't matter if the fundamentals or weak or strong, the whales will always ends up a winner!!
If you are trading, always and always have a stop loss and always have a target price, do not change it seeing the momentum, hype or anything else.
How Retail Traders Can Protect Themselves

Avoid FOMO and hype-driven trades. Sudden, unexplained spikes are often whale pumps. Don’t buy just because a coin is “mooning” – check if genuine volume or news backs the move.
Trade high-liquidity assets. Low-cap coins are easiest to manipulate. Stick to coins with deep markets and big trading volume.

Use proper risk management. Always set a stop-loss and a target price before entering a trade. Binance Square experts advise using wider stop-loss margins (so whales can’t hunt your stops easily)binance.com. Never move your stop-loss further out in the hope of catching a turn – lock in it or cut losses.

Manage leverage carefully. High leverage magnifies losses in volatile moves. As noted by crypto traders, “trading with high leverage increases your risk of liquidation during volatile price swings caused by whales". Only use leverage you can afford to lose.

Diversify and plan exits. Don’t bet everything on one trade or coin. Decide your profit targets and exit strategy in advance. If the market moves against you, exit quickly. As one analyst puts it, in a whale’s game “it’s important to do your own research… and stick to your plan, even if the whales do not stick to theirs”

Common Whale Manipulation Tactics
Pump-and-Dump: The whale buys large quantities to spike the price (a pump), attracting smaller tradersbinance.com. Once the price peaks, the whale sells (a dump), causing a sharp crash and leaving late buyers at a lossbinance.comccn.com.
Stop-Loss Hunting: The whale pushes the price down enough to trigger retail stop orders. These forced sales further drop the price, allowing the whale to buy back cheaperbinance.comccn.com. For example, driving a token from $50 down to $35 can liquidate weak long or short positions.

Spoofing: The whale places large fake buy or sell orders (creating false demand/supply) then cancels them. This can trick traders into making wrong moves (e.g. believing there is high buying interest)binance.com.
Wash Trading: The whale (or coordinated group) simultaneously buys and sells a coin to inflate its reported volume and create the illusion of activity, luring other traders inbinance.com.

These tactics exploit the fact that small traders have limited resources. A retail trader can only short or buy so much before margin runs out, but a whale with deep pockets can sustain repeated waves of buying or selling

Last but not least if it helps you understand the concept and helps you in taking decision even a bit, please like, share and subscribe as I'll posting similar content to help the people out there.
#peace #AltSeasonComing #BESAFE #LearnFromMistakes