Pump.fun graduation: how to trade a migration

How to trade a pump.fun graduation: read the Soon column, what Migrating means, what happens to your position and exits, and the pool right after.

Graduation is the moment the trenches wait for. Which is exactly why so many people sell into it.

What a bonding curve is and the market cap a graduate finishes at are in What is a bonding curve. This page is the trade: what to read before the curve fills, what the app does during the move, and what changes for your bag after.

Soon and Graduated, live, side by side: pump.fun new pairs.

The final stretch: read the Soon column

Soon in Trenches holds launches at 50% or more of their bonding curve. The furthest along sit on top. A launch still under 50%, or whose progress is not known yet, stays in New.

On a standard pump.fun curve, 50% is about a sixth of the market cap it finishes at.

Progress counts tokens sold, not money, so the second half of the curve is where the price does most of its climbing. See the table in Bonding curve progress.

How to read a Soon card:

• The ring. Green for progress, a fainter green for the highest it reached. Hover or tap the logo for the exact percent. A ring well under its faint high means sells are pushing the curve back. Progress can fall.
• The final stretch only. Set Bonding to at least 80%. Ready-made, with top 10 under 30%: Soon launches close to graduating.
• The pills. A curve can be filled by a handful of wallets. Dev, Bundle and Snipers tell you who is sitting on cheap supply waiting for graduation. See Holder checks.
• The score. On the curve at 15% bonded or more, the Alpha score takes 10 points off. Most Soon cards carry that. Remember it, because it matters after the move.

What happens when a token graduates: Migrating

The buy that finishes the curve does not open the pool by itself. There is a gap. In clusterz it looks like this:

1. The card stays pinned to the top of Soon with a full ring and reads Migrating. Hover the logo: "Curve done, its pool is opening".
2. Its Buy shows a spinner and does nothing. Hover it: "No buy until its pool trades". There is nothing to buy from.
3. Once the pool trades, or 20 seconds after the curve finished at the latest, the card jumps to the top of Graduated with a short green flash. The ring turns violet.

On pump.fun the token moves to PumpSwap, pump's own pool. The pool opens at about the curve's last price, so the chart does not jump on the move itself. What moves it is everyone who was waiting.

More in Migrating.

Trading bonded tokens: your position across the move

You hold the same tokens before and after. What changes is where your sell goes.

• Your exits keep their levels. Take profit, stop loss and trailing stop are percents from your average entry. Graduating does not reset them. See Exits.
• A sell in the gap can fail. A curve sell fails on chain once the curve is done. On Live, a sell that fails retries by itself and the position shows Retrying. Expect a few seconds where you cannot get out.
• Exits that run while closed. If you allowed Run while closed, your exit sells were signed in advance for the curve. When the token moves, we drop that signature and sign again for the new pool. See Live exits while the app is closed.
• Copies and snipes. A position a copy opened on the curve sells in the pool after graduation, by that copy's own exits. But in Live every copy buys on the pump.fun curve only, so no copy buys a token once it has graduated. See Copy Trade.
• One trade per token in Live. A second click waits for the first to land. During a busy graduation that queue is real.

Liquidity and price impact right after graduation

A graduate has a pool, and a pool has a depth. Your buy and your sell both move the price, more in a thin pool.

1. Read Liq. On the token page, beside Market cap. A ~ in front means one source only, unconfirmed. "Almost no money in the pool." in the summary means liquidity under 3% of market cap.
2. Set Max price move. In Trade settings. It starts at 10% and turns amber above 25%. Raise it and more fast buys go through, at worse prices. See Trade settings.
3. Size for the sell. If your exit would move the pool hard, a stop loss fills lower than its level. The toast gives the real return when that happens.
4. Watch the score move. The -10 for being on the curve goes the moment it graduates. A score that jumps at graduation can be that penalty leaving, not the token getting better. Read Against, not the number.
5. Watch who sells. Open Trades, pick Cluster, then Market. Big sells right after graduation, from wallets that bought low, are early buyers getting paid.

A graduate whose market cap drops under 5 SOL is dead and leaves Graduated. For graduates people are actually trading, use Graduated with real volume.

Trenches: Soon on the curve, Graduated in its own pool. The ring tells you which.

Final stretch strategy: how we play it

These are our habits, not advice.

• We do not buy the last few percent for the graduation. The buyers graduation brings are who the early wallets sell to. See exit liquidity.
• If we hold into it, exits are set first. A stop loss set during Migrating is a stop loss set too late.
• We wait for the pool. A minute after the green flash, Liq has a number, the first sells are on the tape and the card has a real story. Buying the first second of a pool is buying blind.
• We read Bundle's most. If the bundle held 38% at its peak and holds 14% now, the rest is waiting for the pool. See Bundles and insiders.
• We size down on Graduated cards with thin pools. A pool that cannot take our sell is a pool we do not buy into.

What this cannot catch

• The gap itself. Up to 20 seconds with no buy, and a sell that can fail. Nothing in the app shortens it.
• Figures that stop moving. Our tape follows only the pools we watch, so a graduate's holder figures can go stale.
• Moved tokens. Transfers are not on our tape. A bundle that moved its bag before graduation still reads as holding it.
• Other launchpads. LaunchLab and Meteora curves finish and migrate on their own rules. Read Pump.fun, LaunchLab and Meteora curves.
• What happens next. Most graduates fall. Of the 50 we counted on 1 November, 45 were already under the curve's opening market cap. Graduating is a change of market, not a win.

Before you send it

• Read Soon for who holds the cheap supply, not for how close the ring is.
• Set exits before the curve fills. Not during Migrating.
• After graduation, read Liq before you size anything.
• A score jump at graduation is not news. Read the reasons.
• Finding the launch in the first place: How to find new Solana memecoins early.