I think that it was really strange that in January when BTC went down all big cryptocurrency exchanges closed registration for new members and they opened it only when the price was low. Then at spring when the downtrend was broken(7000$) there were many news that cryptocurrency now will go up! But whales just made big shorts at 10 000 $and all the news said that cryptocurrency won't go up for along time and market went down to current position.
It is hard to tell that the market is manipulated due to many aspects to be considered in every cryptocurrency value. So speculating the manipulation on the market is not a good idea if we want the price to go up because investors might think that they are just used by the whales to leverage on their investments.