'easy' is a relative term of course. The whales can get it back to $20k today if they want to. but that is not in their best interest now. retail is 80% in futures... in the cash market there is no short, but you can imagine that retail is very long at this point. so in the dump phase of the cycle, it's in the whales' best interest to sustain the price as long as there are still more retails 'buying on the dip'... otherwise it will just be a race to hit the best bid to get out... aka a race to the bottom. silver is a better example than the nasdaq 2000 bubble. nasdaq is a revenue producing asset, so the recover is much faster (if you can call 17 years as 'fast').... non revenue producing assets like silver, once a cycle is complete, with retails stuck in positions under water... I wish everyone a happy long life, but the 'accumulation' of the next cycle can take multiple generations, as the current generation may never sell, their heirs, getting the stuff for nothing, will not care about the cost base and high water mark.... they will view this as a dead asset and will sell it for $5/coin or whatever they can get for a case of beer.... that's how whales will re-accumulate for the next bull cycle.... this is how the commodity game is played.
Let's not drink before noon, shall we? Because who would want to have a 200% return in a few weeks? Seriously, what the hell do you know about whales' interest, beside being profits?
"....thinking like a typical retail trader... short it because there are so many longs". https://elitetrader.com/et/threads/xpo-logistics.322105/#post-4673582
think a little deeper... how pump and dump really works, in relationship to the public sentiment. on the way up, everyone is making money, nobody wants to sell, more and more people coming in... so that was in the whales' interest, to set a high water mark, and perhaps distribute some coins to the public, but not too many to kill the rally. was it a coincidence that the cash market peak happened right before the futures markets were opened? the scammers timed it very well too, because once the futures are opened, there is no more blank check to pump it to whatever height they want.... shorting is the natural counter force here. So futures trading started and the price collapsed... At the current stage, look at sentiment, you have public already all in, have you not seen people all around - 'I will sell %% if price reaches $$'.... this is all retail is thinking about right now.... doesn't make sense for the whales to pump it back up again does it? so the dumb retail money can cash out? You need to think what hands each player (whale vs. retail) is holding to make sense out of it. I have said elsewhere - smart money never carries dumb money to heaven. That's what it means, in this scenario.
I actually did exactly that, in the opposite direction, on equities... as the sp500 retail sentiment was 80-90% short thru most of 2016 and 2017.
Thats not true. That statistic. Besides, even if it was, "retail traders" as a percentage of daily dollar volume (and the corresponding movement) on the S&P is about as significant as me pissing in the ocean in an attempt to raise the salinity. It does work however with low volume stocks that can be manipulated easily on slow days that get touted as "great shorts" by various websites. Thats a classic play. And I am certainly not saying BTC is going up... but I would suspect that most "retail traders" that are actually playing the futures on this are experienced traders (as they have accounts that enable them to play the futures) are in fact short. Case in point you. The only new "retail" money coming into this is people who don't have the first clue about trading and have never owned a stock in their life. And I further suspect that those people constitute a very insignificant dollar volume of the total market. See, you talk about "retail traders", but what you fail to understand is the direction of a manipulated trading vehicle is determined by mathematical formulas... when the numbers work out, the so called "whales" will move it in whichever direction they damn well please. Joe the millenial is just along for the ride either way.... but his position and those like it mean absolutely zilch. If you want to use sentiment as a contrary indicator... use the sentiment of the whales, not the tadpoles, because their chunk of the pie is totally inconsequential. My post on XPO is actually just that... a contrary call to the whales sentiment. XPO is being touted as climbing to the moon. I see the reasons its not. See, I'm one step above ya dozer.... been in this game a long time son... and your logic is the rookie logic. That being said now... I do think BTC goes higher. Thanks for the tip. $5700ish will be a floor. Check back in a year.
study the market structure. retail is significant, with stock accounts and mutual fund accounts. don't think daily volume... lots of robots trading against each other... think ownership. ownership matters. think slowly - how does wealth transfer happen. if you issue 'vanCoin' tomorrow, all 21million of them.. you are the whale. you can pump it to $20000 a coin.... but if nobody else participates, there is no wealth transfer... you need to suck blood from dumb money, which is retail. public knowledge - 95% retail traders lose. 5% win, 1% win enough to live on... reason why retail is an excellent contrarian indicator.... this applies to retail futures traders as well... so trading futures = sophisticated trader? that's nonsense. think it thru. slowly.
Those percentages you quote are for active traders and I am not going to debate their accuracy. In fact, its probably pretty close. But their dollar volume in aggregate means absolutely nothing. There is probably less than 200K active traders in the U.S. Mutual funds? How many mutual funds do people own that are "short" funds? ETF's? Wasn't everybody and their brother short volatility several months back via 2X and 3X leveraged products? You don't think these were "retail traders"? They were convinced the market only goes up. You see what happened right?. Ouch. They lost money. A lot of money. So there goes your 90% of retail traders were short in 2016 2017 theory. They were short alright... short the market would never go down. And we are not talking about 21 Million Vancoins (although I do like that concept...) and hypothetical "what ifs". I can start a Zandy ETF too and alot 500 Million shares.... bfd ...no economic thesis will apply. So this argument holds zero water. In the case of Bitcoins however, significant wealth has already been transferred and significant dollar amounts already exist. Bitcoin is an established trading vehicle complete with futures exchanges. Your hypothetical Vancoins is completely illogical and irrelevant to this discussion. So think that thru... real slow.
'active' is a relative term... the fxcm sentiment doesn't swing wildly on short term... you can see the historical chart... the net positions shift slowly. true, not many short mutual funds... but my point is - retail is significant. the point on the vanCoin is that whales don't need some 'mathematical formula' to decide which direction to manipulation. it's a simple matter of what hands their opponents (retail) are holding, and what their sentiment is... of course you need participation first, which bitcoin has.... yes significant wealth has transferred, but the whales goal is to maximize the profit... and at the current price there is still lots of room to work with. slow down more. in this one post you have missed 2 key points - on the mutual funds, and on the vanCoin.
I didn't miss anything. You said "retail is significant". You also agreed that there are very few if any short mutual funds. But before that you said "90% of retail was short in 2016/2017. You can't see the contradiction in your own logic there? And how is that determined? Its math. And come on dude... take off the tin-foil.... "their opponents (retail)" (?)! Large players are playing against an aggregate dollar volume.... it could be the billionaire hedge-fund next door... once again... its all mathematical formulas. At a horse race, there are $2 ticket holders and people who bet $1000's.... its all the same pot.... there is no us or them. Get over the conspiracy theories. Think with logic. Think with math. Thats all that matters. If sentiment is such that most $'s are long... than more than likely, the market will move to take that money. And vice versa. It doesn't matter which hat (retail or institutional) those $'s are wearing. Read Livermore.