Shitcoins / New Listings: You think you're "early positioning," but you're actually helping the project team exit liquidity — you're not buying value, you're buying others' sell orders.

The structure of the shitcoin market ensures that early participants are at the bottom of the food chain. A new coin's "early" phase occurs before you see the candlestick chart — at the moment the token contract is deployed. Sniping bots complete their purchases within seconds; these bots are not tools for retail investors, but weapons for professional teams. They buy and set automatic sell orders before you're even copying the contract address. Every green candlestick you see representing price increases is them unloading.
A more covert trap is "social validation" — someone in the group says, "The project team announced the next roadmap," "A certain KOL just bought in," or "The contract passed the audit." This information is zero-cost in the shitcoin world — project teams can use 20 accounts to post fake messages like "KOL bought in" across 20 groups, and you can't verify it. The only thing you can verify is that by the time you check, the price has already dropped 30% from its peak.
Rule of thumb: treat shitcoin investing like "lottery tickets" rather than "research." The logic of a lottery is that you spend $10 on a very low-probability chance of getting rich — you wouldn't spend three days researching the printing process of the lottery tickets to decide whether to buy. Similarly, with shitcoins, it only takes a few minutes — wasting more time means you're not seeking asymmetric opportunities, but looking for reasons to convince yourself that your money won't go to zero.