whales can't do anything if all the people are having a good trading strategy, placing a stop loss is always needed in crypto currency trading if we don't want to stuck in the whale's trap. Whales are getting richer because of the traders who eats their trap and FOMO in every condition but ended up loss or stuck and hold the loss coin for a long time.
Whales do have enough money to manipulate the market but these whales of bitcoin doesn't really need to be whales of the regular financial world. We are talking about new money here, people who became rich thanks to bitcoin only few years ago, they got in 10 years ago at earliest or even closer and now they are super rich thanks to bitcoin and they can make moves that nobody else can do.
Yeah, they could be getting help from other people who are old money but that doesn't mean that old money was involved and now doing whale moves all by themselves. People like Craig Wright do not act alone and they never will but no wall street guy got into bitcoin too early to make whale moves neither. They have the power and bitcoin early birds have the money so together they get richer and richer.
Yea sure, whales are the rich ones so they can play around with the small investors and use them to profit. But, you can still be lucky, and that's if you invest at the early time when there is a bear trend, as the price is going up you will be profiting.
Whales buy a huge amount of coins causing the price to surge, and they use that opportunity to profit, once they have gathered a lot of money they will then sell their coins, causing the price to plummet. That's why cryptocurrency is a risky job and anyone that wants to be part of this has to understand the risks that are involved in it, and when you want to buy you should as well make sure that the amount is what you can risk.