Ann: Becoming a substantial holder, page-13

Most of the above posts are total bullsh1t! I you look at the announcement, Invesco has been accumulating on market for months and they have now accumulated >5% so needed to lodge a substantial shareholder notice. I haven't done the calcs but if you look at the announcement you can see what they paid for each parcel of shares purchased - I'm sure they paid market price on day of purchase and in many cases they paid much more than current market price. IMO 99% of the posts about manipulation, holding price down etc etc are misguided. It's a free market, anyone is free to buy and sell at any time. If you sell to push the price down (so you can buy back more shares at a lower price), you run the very real risk that someone else will soak up your shares and then you will have to buy back at a higher price. Short selling is not risk free - it is just like going long except the opposite - if you short sell a stock and it goes up aggressively, you will lose your shirt as you will be forced to buy back the shares you sold at a much higher price. In the same way, pumping up a stock (so called pump and dump) is also not risk free - if you aggressively buy up a stock to push price up with the plan to sell once the price is higher, you run the very real risk that you will be left holding the stock with no buyers at the higher price. Normally, pump and dumps are situations where lots of different investors pile into a trendy stock eg. Afterpay, BRN, ESR (pump phase), then stock runs out of good news/runs out of Mojo, investors realize stock is overpriced and sell and price then falls dramatically (dump). What is important to note is that it's not one investor pumping up the price by buying and then dumping, it's hundreds of investors buying (and then selling) in unison. This is exactly how the market is designed to operate i,e. everyone can buy and sell as they choose. Smart investors don't just follow the herd, they carefully assess the real value of a stock before buying, so they avoid buying overpriced/overhyped stocks.