BTC Sideways, is the market maker holding back a big move?

Hello everyone, on June 11, friends in the live channel may have noticed that in the BTC market, which has been trading sideways for the past two days, a strange phenomenon has occurred - certain market makers frequently place "hundred million dollar short-lived large orders". Just like the scene in the screenshot I just took: an order book suddenly showed a buy order of 100 million dollars, but it was canceled in a flash after only less than 10 thousand dollars were executed. This kind of "a lot of noise but little action" operation is not normal market behavior at all, but a typical market maker's baiting tactic.

In just 24 hours yesterday, we captured 4 such abnormal orders. Behind these fleeting large orders, the market maker usually hides three calculations:

The first calculation is psychological suggestion warfare. What is your first reaction when you see an $80 million buy order suddenly on the market at 3 a.m.? Most retail investors will instinctively think that "big money is going to buy the bottom", so they scramble to follow the trend and go long. As everyone knows, this may be a long trap carefully arranged by the main force - they don't want to make a real deal at all, but just use this digital fireworks to stimulate market sentiment. By the same token, a sudden large sell order can also induce panic selling. Just like last week's wave of fake breakdowns of ETH, it was a stampede induced by several "ghost sell orders".

The second calculation is market detection. These short-lived orders are like workhorse sonar probes, specifically designed to test the true depth of the current market. A friend of a high-frequency quantitative team revealed that they often evaluate in this way: if the $50 million buy order is suddenly withdrawn, will the market support collapse? Will slippage exceed expectations? What's even more cunning is that some of the main players will make a fuss bomb on Binance, but secretly open a real position on OKX or Coinbase. It's like a magician's trick, when your attention is drawn to your left hand, your right hand has already completed the key action.

The third level of calculation is behavioral chain deception. What is really worth being wary of is not the number of pending orders itself, but the behavioral chain of "pending orders-cancellations-deals". For example, the main force first put up a $100 million buy order to create a bullish atmosphere, and after retail investors followed suit and pushed up the price, they quietly shipped at a higher level. The whole process is like a well-choreographed drama, and the eye-catching "100 million" is just a poster that attracts you to buy a ticket to enter.

The key to the solution lies in four critical filters:

Transaction Rate Filter - Only focus on large orders with a transaction rate exceeding 80% (Figure 7), directly ignore the "paper tigers" with a transaction rate of less than 1%.

Time Funnel - Set a 5-minute observation window to filter out false orders with a candle period shorter than 3 times.

Amount threshold——In the BTC perpetual contract market, so-called "big orders" below 10 million USD are not even worth a glance.

Behavior Verification - It is necessary to see that the market maker genuinely completes a transaction immediately in the reverse operation after canceling an order.

Speaking of practical tools, our community-developed "market maker behavior tracker" has helped many users avoid traps. This indicator will scan in real time: when large orders appear, is there any accompanying on-chain fund flow? After an order is canceled, does a reverse position open immediately? Just like last week's false breakout of BTC, the system issued a "market maker baiting" alert 10 minutes in advance.

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Remember, in this market where psychological games unfold every second, the true winners always focus on the movements of market maker wallets, rather than the fleeting numerical magic of the order book. In the next live channel, we will dissect "the on-chain fingerprints during market maker wash trading", stay tuned!

This article only represents the author's personal views and does not represent the position and views of this platform. This article is for information sharing only and does not constitute any investment advice to anyone.