then I wonder if this is really the downfall before the pump?
considering that soon we will enter the end of Q4 2019, and in Q2 2020 bitcoin will be halving. so now is the last time the Whales buy cheap btc. that's why the market was deliberately manipulated to make the price of bitcoin go down. and after that they pump slowly to look like market growth.
so what do you think, is my thinking wrong?
Yea and yes
You are right, most financial market are manipulated
And crypto market is Heavily manipulated
The reason why i say so is because you can easily see that crypto market investors/holders are really fragile
A 400 btc dump can trigger a 10% price drop chain effect in less than 12 hours
How do we counter manipulation?
One of the only way to counter it is to push the crypto market cap higher
You can see that the reason why currency pair is not easily manipulated by even 1% is because the marketcap is too huge to be manipulated
They might test the market reaction by minor spike but they would not be able to control the price single handed