What? “Opening short positions then pumping and dumping to trigger the shorts” doesn’t make any sense at all. You’re saying they opened a position that profited if the price went down then they bought to raise the price
If you really dive into the mathematics of finance, you quickly realize that the edge is never "we're better at math than you", but a much more fundamental asymmetry in information/control.
Sometimes that's getting information a few seconds faster, sometimes a data source no one else has exploited, but more often than not its something that feels a bit more "unfair".
