first you need to get knowledge of the past and present of any coin you wants to trade. Keep an eye on the market as well as other coins. Whales will do the rest of the things 
Yeah you are correct that knowledge is important before start trading. When I start trading, I have many knowledges because I studied all the information in trading. I start with small amount of money and I gained many money.Obviously knowledge is the most important thing before we do something that we don't know, because if you are just going to enter the Trading world without any knowledge, then it is like you are throwing away your money. There is a lot of what to do and what you mustn't do in Trading, for example, when you bought a token, then you are hoping that you could make a huge profit out of it after 3 months, but it PUMP a few days ago after you bought, but you didn't know because what you are thinking is you need to hold it for the long time for you to be able to make huge profits out of it.
But the truth is you don't need to hold it that long, all you have to do is to monitor always the prices of the tokens that you are holding, for you to be able to earn big profits like what we are all expecting.