#ETH走势分析 Why do retail investors always fall right before dawn?

You might have heard this joke: "As long as I don't sell, the big players can't do anything to me." Sounds great, but in reality—the big players never cared about your conviction, they just want you to willingly hand over your chips.

Let me start with a harsh example. In a certain ETH bear market, prices plunged 60% in three months; RAY was even worse, dropping straight from 5 bucks to 0.1 yuan. Many people think "holding on is winning," but here's the problem: can you withstand the panic of your portfolio getting cut in half? Can you endure three months of despair with no sign of a rebound?

The first trick of the big players is to use extreme market moves to break your psychological defenses. They push prices down until you question your entire existence, then give you a small rebound to spark some hope, and then continue smashing the price down. After this combo, the only ones left standing are either true whales or the numb "walking dead."

Even more insidious is the time battle. At least a crash triggers a reaction, but what's really scary is the slow, grinding sideways drop. Those using leverage get slowly drained by funding fees, those without leverage are tortured until they start doubting themselves. Going from "let's wait a bit longer" to "forget it, I'm done" often only takes two months.

Once you've learned to "zen hold," the game rules change again. Wild volatility takes over—up 5% today, down 8% tomorrow, up 10% the day after, back to square one next. If you do nothing, the chop numbs you; if you try to catch the bottom, it immediately reverses and wipes you out. $BTC and $ETH , even mainstream coins, can swing this much—let alone small-cap tokens.

The most ruthless move is the coordinated narrative. Even before the market moves much, waves of negative news hit: some KOL calls, a panic in some community, some media outlet goes bearish...all to create a resonance of negative sentiment, making you think "cutting losses is the rational decision," when in reality, you’re just playing your part in their script.

To put it bluntly, the survivors are never just the ones who blindly hold, but those who understand the flow of chips and the cycles of sentiment. When you stop staring at charts trying to guess the top and bottom, and start focusing on on-chain data and capital structure, that's when the real game begins.