thanks... for me the more I try to think like a whale the more I imagine they have more to gain by continuing the downtrend.
They will continue in the direction of least resistance according to supply and demand. That is why after capitulation they began pumping instead of dumping. Fighting natural market forces is a good way to go broke, any market professional knows this. They won't do it. There is also a good chance that they can see both sides of the market and have insider connections--so they know when to mark the price up or down ahead of how much fiat is entering the exchanges and what kind of news is coming out.
They've tested the hell out of this price range and it resulted in an accumulation gradient of rising bottoms (likely by multiple competing interests). This is bullish. They see this. We will test downward as many times as needed to break $300. If it means that they hold most of the coins on Finex to do this, so be it. They will be distributed later.
I get your points. It's just considering the implication that the large actors are sufficiently stacked to change market sentiment completely (tweak indicators, create momentum, etc) wouldn't it be profitable to sell into a rising bull market if you feel with a degree of certainty that you can manipulate it down again? When the consensus targets are above an exit point you are happy with, you know they are going to continiously keep buying at your favourite point before getting exhausted. Let's assume 300 is that point, would roughly 100% gains (if for arguments sake their buy point was near the 166 bottom, and we discount the massive rebound to 315) or more not be sufficient for this whole exercise? The new "sustainable" bull market can come later when the institutions are properly set up and notable new money is flowing in.
Every move costs them money and they want to reduce costs, as anyone logically would in their position. They cannot take control of the entire market; there is still organic trading and medium sized whales that will profit from them given the chance. It's simply more expensive to dump into a bull market that has removed so much supply from weak hands and has so many accumulators waiting. They could still dump down to $220 today, but why would they? It would be prohibitively expensive the likelihood of the dump being successful is reduced as everyone tries to frontrun everyone else for cheap coins. Instead they can push up, which is cheaper and it benefits their massive portfolio of coins they've been building.
The way I see it, Jan 25th's volume shows a large distribution area around $300-$315. This is whales unloading longs from the bottom--they cannot hide from that volume. They likely reloaded during the next few weeks in stealth (the pump before the Bter news had whale footprints) but are still holding as there hasn't been a spike in volume nor a buying climax yet for them to sell into. In fact volume has been reducing, indicating that they're largely observing and waiting. Now if there isn't sustained buying at this level as we consolidate sideways for a few weeks, I could envision an eventual extended test downward to force out remaining bears as they unload and push the market down. If we hold $280 and the market shows a bullish bias in the coming days, I think the direction is obvious for them.
