$RIVER faces an intractable market dilemma.

From a capital perspective, pumping the market is pointless—retail investors simply don't buy in, and the price rally rankings can't even go up. Occasionally pushing the price up becomes a good opportunity for profit-taking, but few are left to buy the dip, leading to another round of fruitless efforts. Under this situation, not only are trading costs wasted, but it’s also difficult to generate effective capital inflows.

The real problem is: unloading requires dumping, which means admitting losses directly; if you don't sell, the costs of oscillating and shaking out traders are a bottomless pit. Currently, with severe imbalance between longs and shorts, this fee income is barely enough to make a difference.

Even worse, after repeated shakeouts, traders who were riding the waves have already taken profits and exited, and market liquidity is deteriorating. Even if prices are forcibly pushed higher, only leftover short positions can be closed, and these gains are negligible compared to the overall losses.

The only apparent way out is a waterfall-style dump to clear out positions, exchanging for some leftovers. From an overall account perspective, this is essentially a total loss.