To be honest, the trend of $PEPE has been suspicious ever since it launched. The candlestick charts are as neat as they can be, which doesn’t feel like the typical game between retail investors.

Looking back, I at least missed out on a 10x opportunity once. That was when the price was around 0.000008. At the time, I thought the rally was already quite fierce and decided to wait a bit. And what happened? It shot straight up to 0.00008. Basically, I got scared out of the position.

But it’s precisely because of this lesson that I thought of another perspective. For tokens like PEPE that are clearly controlled by a whale or a market maker, technical analysis can actually become more useful. Why? Because the market maker also has to follow certain rules — they need to time their accumulation and distribute gradually. They can’t completely go against market logic, so the signals on the charts tend to be clearer.

The key now is, since I’ve already missed it, don’t dwell on it. The main point is whether next time I encounter a similar controlled token, I can recognize it immediately. Over this period, I’ve observed quite a few meme coins and found a pretty reliable standard: look at the ratio between the 24-hour trading volume and the number of holder addresses. Tokens that are truly controlled by big whales usually show very active trading with many transactions, but the growth rate of new addresses is relatively slow. This contrast is the signal.