Most setups start as probabilities. They begin as speculation, and the market either confirms them or deletes them without explanation. The more I trade, the more I realize that price action isn’t mysterious its just a mix of forces some visible and some hidden. Each one leaves a different kind of footprint on the chart, and recognizing those footprints is the only way to understand what’s actually happening.
The truth is that a chart shows only a thin slice of the real activity behind it, there is always more happening off screen. Over time I started grouping the players behind price movement into three levels of visibility:
→Hard to detect
→semi visible
→Fully visible
It’s not a perfect system, but it helps me understand what part of the move I’m actually reacting to.
| Category | Detection |
|---|---|
| Market makers | Hard to detect |
| Whales / OTC / Institutional Desks | Hard to detect |
| Derivatives LPs / Option Market Makers | Hard to detect |
| Quant / Arbitrage Desks | Semi visible |
| Devs / Foundations / VC Unlocks | Semi visible |
| Exchange Systems (CEX / DEX engines) | Semi visible |
| Leverage Retail (Perps/Futures) | Fully visible |
| Spot Retail | Fully visible |
| Aggregators / Index & ETF Arbitrage | Fully visible |
| Social Herd / Sentiment Algorithms | Fully visible |
| Detection level | How to “see” them |
|---|---|
| Hard to detect | You infer them through anomalies: volume vs delta, CVD |
| Semi visible | You can track them with multi-exchange or on-chain data |
| Fully visible | You can literally watch them act in live funding rates, volume, or social metrics |
All these players are the reason price moves at all, and the nature of the move usually reveals who’s behind it. A liquidation spike doesn’t behave like structured sell pressure, and a controlled grind doesn’t behave like algo rotation. The more I watch these differences, the easier it becomes to read the character of the move and decide whether it s worth touching. Im not trying to identify exact participants only the type of flow. Once I know that, the chart stops feeling chaotic. It keeps me from fighting the wrong force, stops me from reacting to noise, and helps me understand whether momentum is real or just retail volatility. I don’t need perfect accuracy, only enough context to avoid trades that look good but mean nothing. When the flow makes sense, my entries improve, my risk feels cleaner, and everything becomes easier to read.
And once the flow is clear, I usually end up seeing the same three behaviors repeat across every coin and every timeframe:
→Momentum: Price, volume, and flow are aligned for at least 3 to 5 consecutive candles.
→Exhaustion: Effort (volume/delta) rises while distance traveled drops for 3 consecutive pushes.
→Breakout: Volatility stays compressed for 15+ candles and price repeatedly returns to the same level with increasing volume.
When I trade, my entire loop stays simple: I watch for the birth of momentum, track the fade of energy, wait for compression to break, and identify which type of flow is active. I only act when the picture feels coherent. Some days nothing makes sense, and I stay out. Other days the chart feels readable from the first glance because the footprints line up.