On the 15-minute $ETH short-term chart, I’ve noticed that every time it barely breaks the previous high, it gets dumped, and every time it barely breaks the previous low, it gets pumped! This kind of short-term fake breakout is called a Liquidity Sweep in the industry. The main target for this strategy is short-term leveraged retail traders. The entities behind this manipulation can be divided into two groups: primary players (professional market makers/whale institutions) and exchanges (acting as amplifiers with rules + tools—not directly taking positions but providing the perfect environment for harvesting). Together, they coordinate to execute the strategy. The underlying logic: retail traders’ unified breakout trading habits + the chain reaction of high-leverage liquidations create the fixed short-term pattern of “dump after breaking the previous high, pump after breaking the previous low.”