The only secret that you should know is buy the dips (Bitcoin dips not altcoins), once you see a big dip in the market be rest assured that there will be a pump.
You are right but it is good to know that the market can be deceiving, although not frequent but possible that after a big dip the market will show sign of increase. After the market increase a little, the price of the coins will start to fall again even more than the last dip. Especially the altcoins, we need to be very careful of them.
For the record, I mentioned bitcoin specifically because I know even if it does fake an increase before it's price correction fact remains that profit is inevitable.
It's obvious if studied from previous performance and patterns which bitcoin had push through, and although we can't be specific about bitcoin nowadays because it could be possible that it has changed patterns since it has reached a good number of mined coin.