In fact, there ARE technical indicators which can predict pump and dump to some degrees of accuracy.
They are called money flow indicators, and trading volume.
The principle is:
Institutional investors or "whales" who are doing the pump, will first buy in large amount of coins at low price. To do this, they need to buy without increasing the price too much (or it will draw other people's attention too early, who then bulk buy and increase the price). This requires buying slowly in small bits, together with some price manipulation tactics (such as buy/sell wall, trick others to panic sell on a small scale, etc). These actions leave traces in the market data, which can be revealed by money flow indicators and trading volume.
To be more specific, this "accumulation" phase before the pump can be characterized by:
"Directionless" or even some downward price trend. Price won't show any sign of rocketing.
Money flow indicators show increase/positive trend, revealing that net money flow trend is positive/inward (or BTC flow in case if its altcoin-BTC market). This is because whales are pouring money (or BTC) in to buy the coins.
Relatively high trading volume. This is due to a combination of price manipulation and whale buying -- both increase trading volume.
In determining the actual case, there may be a little limitation. Whether trading volume is "high" or not, can only be judged with some average trading volume as "reference". If the coin is newly listed on exchange, or without ever undergone any major pump-dumps, there won't be reliable "reference" to compare with. Although you can use historical data of other coins with similar market cap listed on the same exchange for reference, it's not guaranteed to be accurate. In many cases, you can get a sense of typical trading volume only after a major pump-dump cycle.
But other than trading volume, money flow indicators + price trend can sometimes be accurate alone.
Another problem is, there are pump-dumps of different scales and duration. Big, rich and evil institutional investors can certainly set up a large scale billion-dollar pump-dump lasting for weeks or even months. But the little greedy scumbags on those Telegram pump-dump scam groups can also start their own small scale pump-dump, with no more than $1 million poured in and lasts only a few minutes. These pump-dumps of different scale have different degrees of impact on money flow indicators, price trend and trading volume. Usually the small scale ones are much harder to detect (because of their "lighter" trace), and the large scale ones are easier but take much more time to detect. Experience would greatly increase the confidence and accuracy here.
There are trading bots claiming to be able to detect pre pumps, but I don't know if they are good enough, or even really capable to do so. It's totally possible they are pure scams though.
Finally, if you want to make huge profits from pump-dump, the hardest part is not detecting the pre-pump accumulation, but grasping the right time to sell at the peak. Since during pump-dump, price rises and drops too rapidly, the sell window is surprisingly short (for the small scale ones, it can be only a few seconds, leaving you no time to even think and react). If selling early or late, you either miss huge profit, or even lose money when price crashes to floor at lightning speed.
For large scale pumps lasting at least several days, the correct signal for selling can be generally judged by: slowing down of price increase or price reversal, downward trend in money flow indicators, and slowing down of trading volume increase, or even decreasing trading volume. But there is no hard threshold, and the case is different for each pump-dump, leaving you much lower certainty and higher risk.
One very important thing here is overcoming your greed and fear when the price is really high. If you ignore the warning indications of price reversal, hope the price can increase further and decide to hold, you may lose all the profits in a blink when price crashes. If it's a useless shitcoin, you may never regain your profit or money, because the shitcoin will be dead forever after this single pump and dump.
And nowadays, those evil pump-and-dumpers developed more sophisticated techniques. Sometimes, instead of making a "textbook style" pump with a single price peak, they will induce one or more small price crashes midway before reaching the ultimate ATH, or induce one or more price reversals midway during the big crash, to deceive other innocent investors so they can make further profit. One example is the January pump of Binance exchange's own coin (BNB), you can clearly see the abnormal price changes around the price peak. These factors greatly complicated the peak conditions, making it more difficult to determine the right time to sell. If not reacting properly, you can easily suffer huge loss to these crazy price manipulations.
All these are reasons why picking the correct time to sell at peak, is much harder than detecting the pre-pump.
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