Whales and institutional investors is the main factor that make the price in high fluctuacion. Without them, the market with sideaway in long time without any high fluctuacion. Usually before pump the market, whales will doing first accumulation that difficult to detect it. After they did accumulation, and then ready to pump. They did it to make profit and to shake the market to trigger others investor come in to market.
Whales are indeed one of the reasons why the cryptocurrency market is being manipulated. They want to make a profit by controlling the market and making people panic about the state of the market that has been controlled by the whales. Pump and dump will happen according to their plan. Many FUDs are spread to make the market price crash and buy them cheap and then make good news to take profits. Very simple, but market manipulation like the whales must be detected so as not to get caught up in the game.
The whales have indeed control of the market but it is not a perfect control, even they cannot move the market as they wish all the time, what they do is to create the perfect conditions for their manipulations to actually work, then when the conditions finally align they either crash or pump the market and obtain great profits with these kind of movements, is it unfair? Probably but since there is nothing we can do then we need to accept it and learn to live with those movements.