How the Market Makers Extract Millions of Dollars a Day
Understanding the AMD Cycle Behind Institutional Price Movement
How the Market Makers Extract Millions of Dollars a Day
Most traders are taught to approach markets as a guessing game.
Will price go up or down?
Will a pattern break or fail?
Will this time be different?
But markets don’t move randomly — and they don’t move because of retail patterns. They move because large institutions have a business model, and price is the mechanism through which that model operates.
Understanding that model is the difference between reacting to price and reading intent.
The Market Is Not a Game — It’s a Business
Banks, funds, and institutional traders don’t speculate in the way most retail traders do. They operate at scale, and scale requires liquidity.
Price is not simply “discovered.”
It is engineered to attract participation, force positioning, and release profit.
This process repeats across all markets — Forex, stocks, indices, futures, options, and even crypto — because it is rooted in how liquidity is created and harvested.
That process can be understood through a simple but powerful framework:
Accumulation → Manipulation → Distribution
This is known as the Market Maker Method, or the AMD cycle.
Accumulation: Where Positions Are Built Quietly
Before any major move, positions must be built.
This happens during periods of compression, range-bound price action, and apparent indecision — exactly the moments most traders dismiss as “chop” or “noise.”
In reality, accumulation is where institutions quietly build exposure without revealing intent.
Volume increases subtly.
Price holds within defined boundaries.
Liquidity is prepared.
Manipulation: Where Traders Are Trapped
Once positions are established, price must move — but not in a straight line.
This is where manipulation occurs.
False breakouts, stop runs, and sudden spikes are not anomalies; they are designed moves that force traders into the wrong side of the market.
Manipulation is not about deception for its own sake — it’s about liquidity extraction.
When traders are forced out, liquidity is created.
Distribution: Where Profits Are Released
Only after liquidity has been harvested does price move cleanly.
This is the distribution phase — where institutional profits are released into the crowd and trends appear “obvious” in hindsight.
Most traders enter here.
Institutions exit here.
Understanding this timing difference is critical.
Why Patterns Fail and Indicators Lag
Traditional technical analysis focuses on patterns and indicators derived from past price.
But patterns don’t explain why price moves — only how it looked afterward.
The AMD framework is different. It focuses on:
- intent over appearance
- structure over signals
- probability over prediction
This is why the same cycle appears across markets and timeframes, regardless of asset class.
A Professional Lens for Reading Markets
The Market Maker Method is not a signal system.
It is not a pattern book.
And it is not based on hindsight explanations.
It is a professional lens for understanding how price is deliberately cycled to extract profit.
Once you see this structure, markets stop feeling random — and start making sense.
The Book: Millions of Dollars a Day
These concepts are explored in depth in the book
How the Market Makers Extract Millions of Dollars a Day by Martin Cole.
The book lays out the AMD framework clearly and shows how it applies across all markets — without relying on indicators, predictions, or guesswork.
If you’re serious about understanding how markets truly work, this book will permanently change how you see price movement.
Trade the AMD cycle — not predictions.