Since mid-October, there has been a noticeable change in the trading strategies of small-scale market makers—either lurking in obscure coins that no one pays attention to or directly controlling the projects they issue. The reason is straightforward: liquidity exhaustion has caused them significant losses, and to stop the bleeding, they need to be more aggressive.

Want to stabilize and recover losses? Absolute control of the market is the only way out. The problem is, once retail investors follow these kinds of coins, whether they go long or short, they are essentially in a life-or-death situation. Those junk coins that get pumped up are like street vendors attracting customers—once you choose to participate, the direction of the harvest depends on how the market maker arranges the layout—whether they favor the bears or the bulls, depending on where the majority of traders are.

From a trading logic perspective, short squeezes are always the first choice. The reason is simple: shorts with 1x leverage can be easily blown out, and they can also control costs. In comparison, longs with less than 1x leverage are hard to handle; during upward movements, they may suddenly be dumped to clear out chasing high positions. In the final stages, longs that don’t exit will be hammered to the bottom in one go.

Although longs won’t get liquidated, being pinned at the bottom without any upward support, combined with continuous trading fees, will eventually drain them dry over time. Ultimately, retail investors either cut losses or hold on stubbornly. The coins that get trapped become targets for the next round of market maker operations. But if stubborn retail investors refuse to sell, the market maker might simply abandon that coin—after all, there are plenty of junk coins in the market; why bother entangling?