Bitcoin Forum

Who is a whale?

Whales are investors who hold a large amount of a particular currency to be able to manipulate the value using specific strategies to achieve their goals.
They create FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Dismay) and use it to their advantage.
Every currency (and also every sphere of business) has whales who control it and can also manipulate it, in cryptocurrency, their impact is more commonly felt in currencies with low volume.

Can one be a whale without holding large amounts?

A group of traders can also pool funds and manipulate the market, individually they could well be average traders, but together they could cause large disruptions, just like whales.

Do the whales really control the market?

Whales make up very little of the entire community, but could possibly hold more of an asset then the others put together.
Their strategy is dependent on the reaction of the rest of the community.
It's similar to pushing the fire alarm (false alarm) in a building to get people out. More often than not people would panic and rush out, this is where trading skills and abilities come in, making decisions under pressure and putting emotions aside.
If no one leaves the building, their plan is thwarted, same way if traders can discern an artificial FUD they can even profit from the whales strategy.

I am not suggesting you stay in a building when the fire alarm when a fire alarm goes off, by all means get out of there. But in trading endeavour to do your research, be up to date on news and announcements, and try to play the whales game.

Note: Not all price movements is caused by whales, and not all FUD is artificial.

Can you move this to beginners and help. That's probably the best place for this.

Meta is for forum related posts.

Done!
This was where I planned to post it. But due to the earlier glitch, I was reading through the meta thread and just tried posting to know if it had been resolved.

There's always a bigger fish.  I remember when pirateat40 was manipulating the market for gains, until BitPay decided to step in as a buyer and absolutely wreck him during one of the manipulation dumps, which potentially led to the collapse of his Ponzi scheme.  While there was a time when whales could manipulate BTC, I don't believe that is much of a threat these days with the current market.  Perhaps with shitcoins, or you can see public manipulation attempts first hand watching BCH price movements and posts by their cheerleaders.

For whales it is easy for a single entity to pump and manipulate a low market cap shitcoin, but there needs to be sufficient buy volume as well. What they do next is to create a pump and dump group that will buy up their own investment which they done many weeks in advance