True, the risk is there, but if you "help" the Generals by doing the opposite of what they are doing (with a grain of salt, of course) you are not competing with them, which is what you never want to do, unless you work on larger TFs (swing).
I presume you meant "are competing"? If you read the hard-luck stories link I posted earlier, it's clear that's exactly what many of these people were doing. Trying to buck the trend, not realising who they were competing against.
TO, no I mean exactly that, I do not want to compete with the Generals, so I am going to accommodate them and do the opposite of what 90% of the traders will do (at the end the Generals need to make money and to do so they have to trick the traders to go in the wrong direction). Remember one pass of one of the OPs poems: "the Zip is down, here comes the crown"... make perfect sense, doesn't it?
I was sure that's what you meant. It's just that, to me at least, your post didn't read like that. Incidentally, do you know who (or what) the Generals are?
I may be wrong but I wouldn't have thought MMs had much effect on price. They make their money in the bid-ask spread, so I would have thought they'd be broadly neutral. I was watching a top FTSE-100 stock a couple of weeks ago, with a market cap of £21Bn, and it jumped 10% in a couple of days. It got me thinking, who made that happen? It must take some serious money to move a stock like that by 10%.
TO, you checked if the company reported the earnings? big moves like that are usually due to earning of some significant change in the Company (acquisition, approved drug for pharmaceutical etc.). Big money would not do that on their own even if they could (and probably they could do it)