Whether you are a day trader or you trade once in a while, you have to align yourself with the smart money, not the dumb money, surf along side the whales,not against them, trading is war and you have to choose your battles correctly
Basically you never need to bother about where whales are sailing. You can go with only one direction that is along with bulls. Because, that is the only way all the crypto will move finally in long term basis. If you keep changing your directions, I'm afraid you will collapse all in the end. Day trading is not at all recommended for anyone hence just keep buying at dips and when you have some excess money is the only way of trading is suggested to most people here.
When the market becomes bearish, thats the perfect time to hit and buy more with your money while you continue to wait for the bull run. Some people also decide to wait to be very sure that its bull time so they can then get in and go with it. But sometimes it ends up being a Bull trap, cause it might drop when you have invested.
Bull traps must be treated as another buying opportunity. When you find your perfect time to buy on bearish trend then why should you bother about bull traps. Just move on that simply by watching. We should not expect market to turn positive once we have bought. If we understand this, then you will not bother about those traps.
I think it is easy to make money during bull no matter how novice you are in trading. Just get any coin and you will be profiting like madmen. Last year when the price was soaring like crazy there was a lot of people who didn't even know they had so much of something.
A friend of mine had like 5 thousand ripples that he forgot, he had them years ago and he called me up to ask how he could get them back, we figured out where he put them in but that just shows how easy it is to make money during a bull run.
However during a bear run it is highly unlikely that anyone could make a decent return, maybe there are some whales who can make money thanks to shorting bitcoin and actually selling bitcoin to drop the price but that's a stretch and not an easy think to do right now.