Recently, I've seen a bunch of people watching on-chain large transfers and abnormal movements in exchange hot and cold wallets, and they immediately say "Smart money is coming/going." To put it simply, many times what you're seeing is just the team repositioning, not necessarily a directional move.

What truly has a more tangible impact is MEV, this kind of "priority jumping." It usually doesn't hurt the big traders who slowly rebalance their positions, but rather the small traders who are eager to trade quickly and have loose slippage settings: you think your order executes at the moment you click, but someone else inserts their order in front or behind, changing the sequence, and the price ends up being off by a chunk. And project teams shouldn't pretend to be innocent either; during the few minutes of issuing incentives or opening trading, if the order sorting gets chaotic, the early user experience is directly affected. Anyway, I now set my parameters more carefully when placing orders—I'd rather be a bit slower to execute than give others the chance to insert orders arbitrarily.