The whales could manipulate or make the market move so they would always be first in line when the price moves.
It's funny how you refer to whales as if they're working together as group to manipulate the price to their advantage. It's not like that at all. In fact, whales aren't much different from you and me in terms of market outlook and whatnot. They just have more money to invest, that's it. Percentage wise, they lose out just as much as you do if the market turns against them.
Do you think whales all cashed out at a profit last year when we went from $20,000 to $3000? They got rekt just as hard as most people did, and some even harder as they provided buy support around certain levels the many sellers easily sold through
Personally, I wouldn't use this expression in the given context
And not because I love whales so much but for the simple reason it is not truly applicable to them. It is us, simple folks, who might have gotten rekt in the last two years. But if you had, say, 20M dollars' worth of bitcoins at the end of 2017 (which you had probably bought at substantially lower prices anyway), you would still have millions at the end of 2018. In other words, you don't take into account the effects of scale here
That's the reason why the Winklevii twins and the fellas of their caliber needn't necessarily feel like they have been massively rekt, if at all. If you are a multimillionaire you don't shit your pants when your investment loses half of its value as it is not the last money you have
An example of whales getting rekt are the dozens of +$10 million institutional crypto funds that had to shut down with over 90% losses. Amongst them there were even +$100 million funds that lost +90% of what they put in. If they just sticked to Bitcoin their losses woudn't be as severe
I wouldn't call them whales as these funds are managing someone else's money (and someone else should be read and interpreted in plural here as in small fish)
