....and suddenly it's working again, whatever... I was watching...

....and suddenly it's working again, whatever...

I was watching live for a lot of today as the price approached the 40k seller. The bot was definitely 'bating' it the whole time. A 5,243 (around that) order suddenly appeared just below at $19.49, then the price fell away all the way down to ~$19.20, before approaching the mid $19.40's, then backed off, then eventually took about 15k out of the sell, and quickly retraced. It went all the way back to $19.20's in 10 minutes, obviously hoping the remainder of the sell order would chase it down, or other watchers would panic and sell some.

Then the bot made another run up to about $19.40 an hour later, then started backing off again, down to $19.21 again, but still the remaining ~25k stayed at $19.50. Another run up, again a 5243 order was placed just below at $19.49, aand the bot hovered just below that level for a couple of minutes before grabbing the lot and going to $19.55 (to make it look not to obvious it only went up to catch the $19.50 sell order).
Price was trading at $19.55 B - $19.58 S for a minute or 2, then very suddenly a whole lot of different sells appeared on screen between $19.50-$19.55, 1k, 2k and 5k sell orders. The next instant we were trading at $19.48 B -$19.50 S , yet only a few hundred shares actually traded as the price went down below $19.50. So all those 'sells' appeared on screen, then disappeared instantly.

It was all bots, including orders of 5k+, but only there for a few seconds, so no-one could actually grab them. The SP fell back to $19.15 withing another 7 minutes.

IMHO, EVERY bit of trading, both buys and sells in that 7 minute period back to $19.15 was bot action appearing to be some 'panic sellers', just another trick they are using. I suspect that nearly EVERY trade this afternoon since has been the bot buying and selling to itself, with 80-90% of all trades now being the bots, day in day out.

The whole day today appears to be an orchestrated move to buy those 40k shares, and try to get the seller to come down a bit, using every bot trick possible. Of course they couldn't just let them sit there when they are trying to accumulate stock, in case the seller changed their mind, but the little move just above the big sell order and straight back down, had computer playing games written all over it.

Of course manipulating the market is illegal, but somehow these bots give liquidity so are allowed to play this game. IMHO there should be a 5c tax on every separate transaction, if the politicians wanted to be real about a level playing field in the market...

What today's action really told me is that the bot/bots have not gone close to finishing their accumulation, meaning those running the bots think there is far more upside in this yet, and is as much as a buy signal as you can possibly get..