Thread on sideways market:

Sideways price action or consolidation is a phase where institutional players are silently building their positions transacting in smaller quantities.

(1/n)

What we need to understand is that big players have huge amounts of money and one major disadvantage of having such large cap is that they cannot transact in big quantities without being spotted (aka volumes)

In order to minimize this disadvantage to an extent, they will begin building their positions with many smaller blocks of orders to look like multiple small players and to not alert other market participants much.

This kind of price action does not result in major market moves since moving markets requires aggressive buying/selling at market prices.

Instead it results in a sideways price action.

When their positions are built, aggressive activity begins which results in markets moving in a trend. First positions are built slowly and then markets are moved aggressively in the favorable direction to get profitable.