what makes a whale manipulate a coin what is it?
Basic indicators of whale involvement
Assuming no awesome feature for said coin has been released:
Any coin moving up 10%++ several days in a row with trade volume of 400 bitcoin plus is the baseline for some mini-whale involvement.
30%++ per day for several days with trade volume of several thousand bitcoin most likely is real whale territory.
Both.
I doubt it.
Nope. Most of the time it's several smaller whales working together over IRC or something and the whole pump and dump is preplanned in advanced.
Make no mistake, someone is making money.