I have today spent my time watching a low value alt coin that I got stuck in because I failed to pick the down turn a couple of days ago.  As the local exchange I use suffers a bit of real time lag (40-90 seconds) & its charting is a bit primitive I have taken recently to using the cryptowat.ch 'Time & Sales' chart to better understand what's happening with price & trade volumes on an individual basis in real time.

It is clear from today’s observations that there is a group of people trading in this particular coin that are manipulating the market using a pretty simple method. On six separate occasions in the last 8hrs a signal is sent by someone placing 5,6 or 8 consecutive purchases of a distinctive number of coins (28.1) at market price.  The number of consecutive orders is indicating how many minutes until the start of the price pump.  When the time arrives the volume of buy orders is jumping from approximately 40 per minute to 90 – 120 per minute for a couple of consecutive minutes, the sudden flurry of activity is causing other small time players to pile on believing a run is on, then at around the 2-3 minute mark another buy order of 28.1 coins appears in the list and everyone in the know sells quickly dropping its price again, they are making 1.5-2.5% per cycle manipulating the price of this low interest, low value, low volume alt coin without raising a flag to the broader crypto community, its 24hr change percentage has remained under 9% all day .  It took me a while to spot what was going on so I only managed 6.75% myself but had I been quicker to recognise this simple bit of collusion it would have been more like 15%, which for a novice speculative day trader like me is a solid day’s work.

My question to the more experienced traders here is just how prevalent is this sort or manipulation?  Aside from the groups that specialise in manipulating the individual fan tokens which are easy enough to find, are there others out there like this and how does one make contact with and gain admission to one of these groups?  The daily outcomes seem a lot more palatable and safer than what I have been doing.

It would seem that with current global economic conditions and regulators in many jurisdictions currently reviewing crypto with a view to legislating broad change, general market uncertainty will remain  for some time.  That said, we have already seen some sharp but unsustained pockets of activity amongst some altcoins already this year, I am guessing that this will remain the case for several months and that short term opportunities are where the money is to be made for the time being.  It would seem unwise to be committing to long term strategies at this time.

Hi All, I am CryptoNovice.  I have been playing in this market for a few months trying to get an understanding of the ins and outs.  I have lots of questions which I am hoping the wise and experienced participants here can provide guidance on?