shorting: asx surveillance and price action

I spoke to the ASX this morning, and registered a complaint which they logged. They are monitoring LGL. My complaint was that despite majority broker "Buy" recommendations, and the price of gold rising, plus a good report yesterday, it appeared to be heavily shorted (dare I say "manipulated"???).

The total shares notified to the ASX as being shorted as of midday today was 14.7 million - almost exactly the number traded in the day to that point. And that's only the notifiable naked shorts - it doesn't include covered shorts using borrowed shares. That isn't detectable anywhere.

I registered my disgust at the goings-on, and expressed my cynicism re the ASX surveillance of such matters after the fiascos of revent weeks with the targeted short-selling bringing various companies to their corporate knees.

Interestingly, two things happened - while I was on the phone to them at about 12:30-ish, there was a sudden drop in the SP with an abvious stoploss event being triggered. The person I was speaking to had the course of sales on their screen and saw it at the same time that I did.

Then, shortly after that, we have seen the start of a rise in SP - ?short-covering?

The whole thing smells to me of manipulation of the highest order, and the ASX should be ashamed to let stuff like that happen. We small retail investors and traders have NO chance against funds that can do that sort of thing, or the funds who use DMA "bots" to shove the price one way or another at will.

Let's hope that the shorters get badly burned - but I doubt it. They're probably buying at these discount prices and building up a nice holding....! Grrrrr!