The first 90 seconds

Someone posts a contract address. The chart is already moving. You have about a minute and a half before the entry you are looking at is gone. What do you actually check, and in what order?

The order matters more than the list. Most people check the interesting things first — the chart, the socials, the meme — and the boring things last, if at all. That is backwards. The boring checks are the ones that eliminate the most candidates for the least effort, so they go first. You want to be spending your remaining seconds on coins that have already survived the cheap filters.

Seconds 0–20: can they take the pot?

Before anything else, establish whether the people who made this coin retain the technical ability to take your money whenever they choose. Four things, all verifiable on a block explorer or a screener's token page:

Liquidity locked or burned. If the pool tokens sit in a wallet the deployer controls, that pool can leave in one transaction.
Mint authority revoked. A live mint means unlimited new supply can be created and sold into your bid.
Freeze authority revoked. On Solana specifically, a live freeze authority can prevent you from selling at all.
Top-10 holder concentration. Excluding the pool and burn addresses. If ten wallets hold half the supply, ten people decide your exit price.

If any of the first three fail, stop. There is no chart good enough to compensate, and no explanation in the Telegram that changes the on-chain reality. This filter alone eliminates the large majority of what you will look at, which is exactly why it goes first.

Seconds 20–45: is the volume real?

Now look at whether anyone is genuinely buying, or whether the activity is manufactured. Three tells:

Holder count trajectory. Rising steadily is organic. Several hundred appearing in a single block is one entity with a lot of wallets.
Buy-to-sell ratio and unique buyers. High volume from a small number of addresses cycling is wash trading. High volume from many distinct addresses is a market.
Liquidity depth relative to market cap. A coin at a $2M cap sitting on $15K of liquidity cannot support anyone leaving. You included.

That last one is the check people skip most and regret most. Your entry is only as good as your ability to exit, and in a shallow pool your own sell order is the thing that crashes the price.

Seconds 45–70: is there a reason for a second wave?

A coin only continues if buyers who have not yet heard of it eventually do. So the question is not "do I find this funny" but "can I state, in one sentence, why someone who has never seen this would want it tomorrow?"

If you cannot articulate the narrative in a sentence, the next buyer cannot either — and the next buyer is your entire thesis.

Check whether the social accounts are real and original rather than renamed from a previous project, whether the community is talking or just posting rocket emojis on a timer, and whether the theme is fresh or the fortieth iteration of something that peaked last week. Recycled accounts and recycled themes are both signals, and both are negative.

Seconds 70–90: size and write the exit

Only now do you decide how much. Use a fixed percentage of your bankroll as the maximum loss, work backwards from your stop to get the position size, and then — this is the part everyone skips — write down where you are selling before you buy.

Not roughly. Specifically: the level where you take the stake off, the levels where you scale out, and the level where the thesis is dead and you leave regardless of how you feel about it. Written before entry, when you are calm and have nothing at stake.

The calculators on this site handle the arithmetic for that in a few seconds, which is the whole point of them: the maths should not be what slows you down, and it should not be what you skip.

What this sequence cannot do

It cannot tell you whether the coin goes up. Nothing can. Every check here is defensive — it removes the ways you lose money for structural reasons, so that the money you do lose is lost to the honest randomness of the thing rather than to a trap you could have seen.

That distinction is worth internalising, because most of the improvement available to a retail trader in this market is not in picking better winners. It is in not taking the trades that were never going to work, and in not giving back the ones that did.