Retail investors always think that the whales are watching their few coins. That's really not the case.

After so many years in the crypto market, the most common complaint I hear is, "It's dropped again, damn whales must be targeting me." Wake up—your tiny position isn't even on their radar. When it comes to shakeouts, the goal is how high they can pump it later and how smoothly they can offload.

I once personally witnessed the entire operation of a coin—let's call it M Coin. It started at 1.2U, with a circulating supply of 10 million tokens, and retail investors held 60% of the chips. A team accumulated 4 million tokens at the bottom but didn't make a move for a long time—they knew very well that if they force-pumped it to 1.5U, early retail holders would dump, and there’d be no one to catch the bags. The party would fall apart halfway up.

Their playbook had three steps.

Step one: silent, gradual decline. The price slid from 1.2U to 0.9U, no trading volume, no news. Retail chat groups started to panic: "Is this the end?"