The volume spike playbook
Turnover against depth is the only spike measure that survives a review. Four spike classes, what each implies mechanically, and the rule attached to each.
Read the playbookReading liquidity events without guessing
Most of what happens to a Solana memecoin is a liquidity event: a pair opens, a curve graduates into a pool, a wave of activity arrives, a large holder unlocks. Each one has a mechanism you can describe before it happens.
This desk writes those mechanisms up as rules. Every rule is published with what it costs you, the case where it fails and the condition that ends it. No forecasts, no calls, no claim that any of it wins.
The format every entry uses
Five lines. If an idea cannot be written this way, it is not a rule yet.
- Situation
- What is observably happening, described without a prediction attached.
- Mechanism
- The protocol or market-structure reason the situation looks the way it does.
- Rule
- What you do, written so that another person could follow it identically.
- Cost
- What following the rule gives up, including the trades it makes you miss.
- Invalidation
- The condition that ends the trade without needing a fresh opinion.
The five recurring situations
Almost every trade a Solana memecoin trader takes sits inside one of these. Naming the situation first is what stops a reaction from turning into a position.
01
A pair opens
The first hour of a listing, where price exists but history does not, and most of the work is establishing what you can actually see.
02
A curve migrates
A bonding curve completes and liquidity is handed to an automated market maker pool. The pricing engine changes underneath the same ticker.
03
Activity spikes
Turnover jumps against the depth that is present. The number alone says nothing until you divide it by the liquidity it traded through.
04
Depth thins out
Providers widen or withdraw and the pool that filled you cannot fill you back out at anything close to the price on the screen.
05
Supply arrives
A holder, a vesting release or a treasury sale puts tokens into a book that was not sized for them. Ownership concentration is public.
Featured playbooks
A playbook is a situation plus a rule written before the situation appeared. These four are the ones the desk returns to most often.
The first hour of a listing
What is observable in the first sixty minutes of a new pair, what is genuinely unknowable, and why the hour is mostly a data problem.
Read the situation noteEntry rules that survive review
Most entry rules cannot be audited because they never state what would have stopped them. A template that fixes that, with worked examples.
Read the templatePosition sizing in thin markets
In a thin pair your size decides your exit price. Sizing from pool depth rather than account balance, with the arithmetic worked through.
Read the risk noteThree sections, one method
Situations describe what happens. Playbooks turn a situation into an executable rule. Risk rules cover the part of the process you actually control.
Situations
The recurring shapes a Solana market takes when liquidity arrives, moves or leaves: a first listing, a migration between venues, an activity spike, and the ordinary hours in between.
Open the sectionPlaybooks
A playbook is a situation plus a rule you wrote before the situation appeared. Each one here states its trigger, its cost, the case where it fails and the condition that retires it.
Open the sectionRisk rules
The part of a method you actually control. Size chosen from depth rather than conviction, exits decided before entry, and an invalidation written in advance so a bad trade ends on schedule.
Open the sectionThe three risk rules everything else depends on
These are stated first because the rest of the site is worthless without them. Each one costs something, and the cost is named.
Size from depth, not from balance
Your position is a fraction of the liquidity you will have to exit through, not a fraction of your account. The pool decides the maximum, not your conviction.
Cost: you will take smaller positions in exactly the markets that move fastest.
Write the exit before the entry
A scale-out ladder, a time limit or a structural exit, decided while you are still neutral. An exit invented during the trade is a reaction, not a plan.
Cost: you will exit early in the trades that would have continued without you.
Invalidation is a sentence, not a feeling
One written condition that ends the position with no new argument required. If you cannot state it before entering, the trade has no defined risk.
Cost: some invalidations trigger on noise and end trades that were fine.
Where activity comes from
Reading a tape honestly means accepting that not all of the flow you see is discretionary trading. Some of it is arbitrage closing a price gap between pools. Some is routing, where one user request lands as several swaps. Some is deliberately produced activity, run by teams who want a pair to be visible on venue and aggregator screens.
None of that is hidden. It is all in the transaction record, and knowing which category you are looking at changes what a spike means. The desk treats produced activity as a normal, observable part of Solana market structure rather than as something to be scandalised by, and reads it the same way it reads any other flow.
What the record actually shows
- The program that executed a swap, and therefore the venue it used.
- Whether one signer sent many transactions or many signers sent one each.
- Whether buys and sells alternate in a pattern too even to be discretionary.
- How much of a session's turnover passed through a single pool.
- Whether the pair's depth grew alongside its turnover or stayed flat.
How this desk writes rules
Three commitments that decide what appears here and, more often, what does not.
No forecasts and no calls
You will not find a price target, a win rate or a claim that a setup pays. The desk has no way to know any of those things, and publishing them would be inventing evidence. What can be described is mechanism: what a pool does when you push size into it, what a curve does at graduation, what an unlock does to a book.
Every rule carries its cost
A rule that only lists its benefits is marketing. Each rule here states what it gives up: the entries it will refuse, the exits it will take too early, the noise it will mistake for a signal. You should be able to decide against a rule using the desk's own description of it.
Numbers are labelled or absent
Protocol facts are stated as facts. Arithmetic is labelled illustrative and uses round invented figures to show a mechanism. There are no statistics about how traders perform here, because the desk does not have a dataset that would support one.