Recently, I saw someone in the community asking what "drawing a door" means, so I decided to organize my understanding of this phenomenon.

Actually, the "drawing a door" pattern is a quite common tactic in the crypto world. Simply put, it’s when the price surges sharply in a short period—then consolidates sideways—then crashes dramatically. On the candlestick chart, it looks like someone has forcibly drawn a door, hence the name. When I first entered the space, I also fell for this kind of market behavior, and I couldn’t react at all at the time.

Interestingly, this situation is almost unseen in the stock and forex markets, where at most you see limit-down days or V-shaped reversals. But in crypto? It appears again and again, which is really strange. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies do have their unique characteristics.

To put it plainly, the "drawing a door" pattern is entirely manipulated by the whales. They rely on this rapid surge and plunge to perform "targeted liquidations," blowing out both long and short leveraged traders, and quickly harvesting large profits. Any technical analysis or indicator-based analysis is useless in this scenario because it’s not a natural market evolution but a result of human manipulation.

Normal investment assets tend to enter a cooling-off period after reaching resistance levels—bulls are afraid that pushing higher will be exploited by bears to sell off, and bears are afraid that bulls will use investor sentiment to push the price up again. So they often test and tug at resistance levels repeatedly. But the "drawing a door" pattern isn’t like that; the tug-of-war is very short, the price looks stable, and then suddenly plunges, making people doubt their own eyes.

One background I’ve observed is that some quantitative funds set up at-the-money close positions at certain levels. They’ve already made profits, and the system automatically closes positions once a certain value is reached. The machine executes commands without thinking. As a result, no one dares to place orders below, triggering a chain of liquidations, and other funds follow suit selling off, completing the "drawing a door" pattern.

So if you see this kind of extreme market behavior, you can basically be sure that big funds are causing trouble behind the scenes. For retail investors, the best approach is to recognize this risk and stay cautious with leverage trading.