Several friends have asked me how to tell if some small-cap coins are being manipulated by a whale to 'go long' or 'go short'?

First, you need to understand why a whale will exit contracts to harvest:

1. Harvesting seeks counterparties; as long as someone wants to sell a coin, there must be someone willing to buy. Currently, in this market, no one is willing to take on the spot of mountain coins. The willingness of retail investors to buy is very low, regardless of how much it rises or falls; however, many contract traders are stubborn and willing to go short. When the whale bursts the long position, causing them to close their positions, this action is actually 'buying', effectively converting the short sellers at a high level into buying pressure.

2. The liquidity of contracts is multiple times that of spot.

3. Due to leverage, the efficiency of the whale's capital utilization is extremely high.

4. The circulating spot only needs to be controlled, while contracts can be manipulated freely.

For example, how could the previously skyrocketing OM continue to rise so much? The operation involves controlling the money in spot and then the whale opens long positions in contracts. By pushing the spot price up, they force the short positions in contracts to be liquidated, then the profits from the long contracts are used to buy more spot, creating a snowball effect, resulting in a continuously increasing market cap.

Understanding the above, when you want to know whether a coin has a whale or speculative capital at play, just look at the whale's contract positions. The main focus should be on open interest (OI) in contracts. This indicator has two aspects: one is to look at the absolute value. If a low market cap asset has a huge contract open interest, even exceeding its market cap, then there is definitely capital or a whale involved in manipulating the situation beforehand, as this was also mentioned by this toxic brother.

The second is to observe the instantaneous changes in contract open interest to catch the whale opening long and short positions in real time, and then you can ride along with the whale. Below, using Turbo and BroccoliF3B as examples, when the whale opens long and short positions, the contract open interest experiences instantaneous massive changes.