So there aren't a lot of whales?
NEM has no whales.
Not true. While no whales may have been generated by distribution, anyone could have bought well over 5% of the total NEM supply on Poloniex during the last trading week. There could easily be just a couple of whales with the majority of NEM on Poloniex manipulating the entire order book for all we know.
50-100 BTC is all it takes to manipulate any crypto market of this size. Given the current prices, that's really not that much money to be a "whale".