Spotting Whale Pressure
Whales leave fingerprints in the book—clusters of large resting orders, sudden wall refreshes, and rapid cancels—so tracking those signals tells you where heavy capital wants to keep price. Noticing which price bands they defend helps you anticipate which levels will hold as support or resistance.
Size and Discipline
Because the size of their orders can shock the tape, treat whale moves like context, not a signal to chase; patience comes from observing whether they stay put or shift positions repeatedly. Combining those clues with the heatmap or delta will show if they are accumulating or simply testing liquidity.
Whales are entities with enough capital to place orders that can bend short-term sentiment, so their footprints in the book deserve special attention. Even if they do not move price immediately, knowing where they stage their orders tells you which levels they want to defend or attack.
These large participants can inject volatility by adding or canceling orders quickly, so the book often flickers with fading walls or sudden fills when they shift stance. The key is that their size makes the market behave differently than it does for average retail trades.
Tracking whale movement matters because their preferred prices become temporary magnets — a thick bid wall where a whale likes to accumulate can feel like a safety net, but if it evaporates you may see the level break suddenly.
Order flow clues include rapid executions near a price, orders that vanish moments after appearing, and clusters of fills that pop up without breaking the spread; combine those signals to separate coordinated whales from normal chatter.
Platforms such as Whalytics group large orders into whale buckets, so you can quickly see which price bands hold most capital rather than counting each entry manually. That lets you gauge whether the heavy hitters are staying put or shifting their stance.
This is not investment advice; treat the observations as a way to sharpen awareness rather than a prompt to trade.