I've joined pump & dump (or "signal") groups on Telegram back in 2017 and I learned my lesson. Some of these groups had an incredible influence over the prices but the chances of earning anything through the P&D cycles were slight. Before I could even write down the 3 letters of the coin to buy it, the price was already at its peak. I had to buy it at peak and sell it with huge losses. Hence, it's a bad idea to go for these schemes.
This is a pretty risky thing to do, but when trading I usually looked for the coins with a high difference between the first buy order and the first sell one which also had a decent volume. I would place an order to buy it
for a 10% smaller price and as soon as my order's filled, I'd sell it for the "cheapest" price on the sell order book. By doing that, I once doubled my balance in a matter of hours, until it didn't work anymore.
But then, there's a difference between the usual trading (using analysis) and using order book differences in order to benefit off them. If one's going for trading based on analysis, then more popular coins (like BTC and ETH) are better. They have high volume, the chances of your orders to fill up faster are way higher, you don't need to sell your coins for a shitty price and pump&dump groups cannot have much of an influence over the prices of these coins unless they have whales inside them.
Firstly, joining pump and dump groups are a bad news. I've had my own fair share of pumping groups. My experiences were nothing to write about. Even signals groups aren't worth it. They make you think that giving you fishes to eat would make you happy but it's wrong. Even if they do make you some profits, it is short lived most of the time. At to be clear, most of those signals are just predictions, other times, they are copied. That said, either ways shouldn't be considered by anyone who plans to take trading seriously.
I've not really tried the method you mentioned – That is, to buy/sell based off orderbook differences. I mainly trade after doing the good old traditional technical analysis. What I do is to check the current market conditions (via the fear/greed) index. Depending on the outcomes, I check trading communities that I am part of to see which tokens/coins everyone is looking to trade. Then I proceed to trade. This way, even if I make mistakes which results in losses. I can learn from them and improve.
