How To Reduce Your Chances Of Getting Rugged: A High-Level Overview

Hey all,
So starting with the obvious, as this run picks up and as new people are jumping into meme coins after watching some experienced YouTubers trade thinking this is easy, we're seeing a lot more "I got Rugged" and "How did this Rug?" posts. I wanted to give you something that might actually be helpful amidst all the sarcasm that litters the comment sections on rug posts.
I hope it's ok for me to post something like this. I've made some less extensive versions of this in some replies to said threads, but I've fleshed it out for a full post. If you've seen those comments, there's more here.
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DISCLAIMER: Let me say this now, I am in NO WAY recommending you trade meme coins, or any crypto for that matter. This is in no way financial advice and I will not be taking any responsibility for losses. I am in no way trying to increase your confidence in trading these tokens with this info, you get into this understanding full-well the risks involved and should only trade/invest with money you're comfortable losing. In fact, I'm hoping some of you will think twice or at least wait once you realise there's a LOT more going on than you initially thought. If you feel like you absolutely must continue, understand that the title of this guide is more for your attention as what I'm covering are the bare minimum basics you need for trading and identifying scams with ANY crypto, meme or otherwise.
This post assumes you already know about RugCheck, which you should be running every coin's "Contract Address (CA)" through before buying. This post is a little unstructured and there is definitely more to it that this, but this is a good high-level starting point.
At the very least, I hope this sparks a healthy google session on your end if there are things in here you haven't heard of or don't understand at all. There's more to this than buying and hoping for a good result. If you see some terms in quotation marks, chances are those are what you should be googling. You don't know what you don't know so hopefully there's a few gems in here.
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RugCheck:
So to start, you need to be looking at more than just the "GOOD" marker in RugCheck. Most notably, the posts like "The liquidity was locked, how did this rug?" or even worse, "How did they unlock the liquidity after it was locked?" can be avoided by going just a bit deeper. Understand that you can't "unlock" the liquidity pool once it's been locked/burned. Very rarely only a portion of the pool is locked and they yank the rest out, the other 99% of the time what you're seeing is this:
If 3 or 4 out of the 5 top wallets (including the Raydium wallet) have random small percentages of the token and there was no "presale" (these also aren't always great), then chances are high it could be the other popular scam, dumping. This often is in the form of the dev having kept a massive chunk of the supply, sometimes like 90%+ and spread it across a hundred wallets to trick the "holder ownership" check. The scam here is they're planning on dumping (selling) on everyone when they're happy with the price/market cap. Just one of the tell-tale signs of this is when the token launches at an already high market cap due to a massive amount of the tokens already being owned.
When you see all the liquidity gone after a dump scam like this where the LP was locked, that's not the same as the dev pulling out the liquidity (the other most popular scam). Liquidity goes up and down depending on the amount of tokens that are being held. If 90% of tokens get dumped, obviously that means there's less liquidity. 2 different scams.
Also tokens with "Mutable Metadata" still enabled, I've found, have a lower chance of running well and having strong second waves as it could be one of many listings the dev changes the names, images and socials for later to hide his long list of repeated scams. Not that they can't run and that this is true 100% of the time, it's just something to keep in mind.
Getting in, Getting out, and Trading SAFE:
I shouldn't need to tell you this, but don't just ape into anything until you see that liquidity pool locked. Also don't get cocky kid and sit there trying to race the dev to see if you can buy and sell at a profit before he pulls the unlocked liquidity out.
Familiarize yourself with the "Fibonacci scale" (google this and how it works in crypto, it's an incredible phenomenon) and use it to look for pullbacks if you're unsure where to get in. Meme coins in particular often dive deep into 0.618 - 0.786 territory and can bounce back if there's enough "volume", which is something you also need to watch and learn about, THOUGH THIS IS NEVER CERTAIN AND IS BASED ON MANY THINGS. If it's diving past 0.786, this could absolutely be the point of no return and it might be time to take your profits or your 20-30% loss and move on, and that's ok. Trust your gut, don't over-stay.
Also if you're there early, it might be a good idea to not buy until you see at least a good portion of the big sell-off by the dudes running scripts with their own nodes. You can never beat them and can't partake in what they're doing without BIG money, 10g internet and a LOT of knowledge. They're the ones that bought on Block 0 (usually the first big green candle(s). Learn what the candles and wicks mean and how to read them). No, the "snipe" feature of your Unibot/Trojan or other run-of-the-mill TG bot is not what this is in the slightest, so don't get excited.

Understand that sometimes you'll be waiting an hour or more for an (in my opinion) actually decent coin worth your time to pop up. Don't rush or FOMO, take your time.
When looking at a graph, enable the "EMA" "indicator" and watch the average. Once enabled, I like to double click the EMA line and set the length to 20 and change the color to orange so it's better visible.
Is the EMA line going down? Probably not a good idea to buy or try to catch red candle "falling knives", that's when you should consider taking profits if you're in, or getting out completely. Do you see a some strong "higher lows" and the AVERAGE line going up? That's when you might consider buying, again, if there's enough volume, strength, and confidence in the coin where it may continue to go up. It most certainly won't always.
Sometimes it's also worth waiting for the coin you wish to trade to break some milestones first before getting in. Is it struggling and "consolidating" a lot at the 10k, 20k, 50k, 100k, etc market cap? It might be best to wait to see if it breaks through before jumping in, and if it doesn't, check fib again to see if you can get in on a correction. Learn about these common "support/resistance mcap levels" and learn about "confluency", which is a different type of support level again based on previous all-time highs (ATHs) and lows. This is part of the psychology section of this game that you MUST learn.
The Telegram Trading Bots + Dexscreener/BirdEye and Alternatives:
Lastly, the telegram bots like BonkBot and Trojan (formerly UniBot), while useful and feature-rich, many of us have found can be slow and janky. Dexscreener and BirdEye, believe it or not, are also slow to update the graph and liquidity lock, and sometimes it'll need a refresh for the lock to appear. I've gotten used to using the graphs and trading from within Photon instead. I've found the graphs and liquidity status update far quicker than Dexscreener and it has its own trading bot as part of the platform that is notably quicker than the TG bots. It also never felt right to be buying and selling on freaking Telegram of all places. If you're serious about this, you want all the speed you can get and that goes without saying.
Sidenote: I do have a referral link for Photon I'd be happy to DM. Full disclosure, we both get something out of it. It didn't feel right just posting my link here but I'd be happy to if the mods are ok with it and feel it's been deserved.
What many of us on Photon do to VASTLY reduce the amount of scams clogging up our eyes and brains is to filter the new pairs list to only show those with "Mint Auth" disabled and "At Least 1 Social".
One thing I like about and still use BonkBot for, however, is the alert channels (I'm sure many TG Bots and channels provide something like this). I like to unmute the "burned" channel (the one with the fire emoji), as it tells me and sends notifications of when liquidity locks on every token, sometimes faster than even photon. I check the notification and if its the coin I'm looking at getting into, it'll help me make a decision quicker.
No matter what platform you're using though, It's also a good idea to check the search bar for other coins with the same or similar name while rug checking, to see if that coin has either been done to death or if it's a scam that's been being milked 8 times a day. Look at those coins, are the images and socials the same? Did they rug every time? High chance of scam. I also check to make sure the CA matches with the CA listed on the coin's website (if it has one) if they've put it there, to make sure its not some reused crap. It's common to see copycat scam clones of coins that actually did run 30min, a day, or even a month ago.
To Conclude:
Understand from now that you're never gonna win every trade, no one does. If people are winning 60% - 70% of the time then that's considered good. People refer to memes as crypto gambling and for good reason, but the odds can be in the green if you know what you're doing. Don't get greedy, smaller profits like 1.2x - 1.8x or whatever are fine and you should be happy with that. It's possible to make a handful of those a day. Don't force any trades because you think you have to make a trade.
Wait and if nothing good pops up in your time at your desk, then it is what it is. Not everything is a 3x - 20x, in fact very few will be if you're doing this properly and sustainably. Don't chase it and stay up late trading tired and frustrated. You also don't need to be getting in to just "new pairs". You may even consider smaller gains on some already less volatile, semi-established/"trending" coins.
Don't get me wrong, there's definitely some mega-money to be made in this game, but not for 99% of us. You'll see that day's best opportunity pass you by the more you watch. You might be in the right place at the right time and make the right call on the next big blow-out, but don't count on it. Keep your emotions in check.
Take your time and play with 0.1 or 0.2 Sol purchases for a few days or weeks until you can now see things you couldn't before. Have conviction not just in your buying but perhaps most importantly, also in your selling.
Final note, have a long term plan in place as well. You should be mixing short term trading into long term investing. If you're winning in Sol, don't blow it, allocate some into a broader portfolio of coins that can run this bullrun and come out on top. That's your real goal in crypto.
If this is all Greek to you, slow down and get educated. Stay safe. You're a trader, not a gambler. Act like it.
Much love
u/Avsynth

Addendum
Since Meme coins is becoming a get rich scheme now particularly in Solana, i thought it would help if i could write about Rugpull projects that happened a lot of times with Meme coins in Solana Network. But i saw this excellent article on reddit yesterday i thought instead of wrtting one i might as well share this article by a redditor going by the handle Avsynth, it covered pretty much everything you have to know about rugpull projects how to stay away from it and how to be carefull when getting into to meme coin projects. I hope this article will help.

Me.