I think we can all agree that the movements these past few days defy the logic of what should be happening with the market. Consolidation never happens, retracements aren't as deep or strong as they should be, and low volume trading still drives the prices of coins up 10%. Is that manipulation, or is that just crypto? How do you tell what is going to happen, and compare it to what should happen?
I have written several ideas about how to day trade, despite my newness to crypto, and then I have written pieces about how all of those ideas make very little difference because the market does literally what the whales want. So I went back to the drawing board and looked through the past few days of trading, and sought to see the most basic and fundamental tells that can help the would be trader. What I have discovered in that analysis is that there are 2 tried and true patterns that very rarely if ever fail!
The first pattern is the Double top and Double Bottom. Those two patterns are consistent no matter the volume, no matter the direction of the market, no matter the feelings of greed or manipulation. The second pattern is that any major move down, or up has cascades and until a true reversal on the hourly, or 30 min charts get painted in, the direction remains the same. For big dumps this means there are at least going to be 3 "cascades". Never buy the 1st or the 2nd cascade unless you are really adventurous and don't mind .5% or smaller gains.
What we saw today was that on most alt charts there was a major dump that took 3 cascades to bottom out and then the rest of the day the prices went straight up with minor corrections, similar to the start of the parabolic move at the beginning of the month. There have been very few double bottoms, but there have been double tops on the 5 min charts that created a minor correction before angling back up. All of this with very low volume, which is unusual for this kind of movement.
This tells me that regardless of the long term movement a double top still reacts with a correction, and a double bottom with trend reversal. Major trend changes can also be triggered after 3 cascades in either direction. So next time you see major price movements remember the Rule of 3, and the Rule of Double!