Soggywinks, how it works on the close, is that some brokers have computers with live feeds in the same room as the ASX computers, this is for speed. The algorythyms they are programmed with are the 'bots' we talk about. They have orders already in place both above and below the current price action.
During the closing auction as both buys and sell mount up, a buy bot is set to pick all the shares at the close at a certain price. Sure there might be other orders sitting a a higher price as well, but it is there making sure that the orders are kept fairly even during the closing auction. At the very last fraction of a second before the close, the bot changes the number of buys or sells to make sure it has picked up the most possible shares at the lowest possible price. In today's case the price being 62c.
If you are using the bot and it only picked up say 351,000 shares in today's close, then paying 62c for them instead of 62.5c is worth $1755 in savings. Do it over 300 stocks everyday of the year, and you are starting to talk real money. They do the opposite when selling.
Basically the stock closing that extra .5c down on close by 1 share is a great sign that someone is accumulating a lot of shares. This has happened a lot to us and is very frustrating when you see the value of your portfolio go down by several thousand dollars because of that 1/2c extra down.
The real question is, is this manipulation OR just buying at the best price? We the shareholders will always call it manipulation while in court the big boys would argue just buying at the best price (or doing the opposite and selling). There is no way ASIC would win a case of manipulation on this and they know it.
The laws that allow this are made by politicians that get huge contributions from large funds and brokers for their parties (both sides), so the laws are made that are a little ambiguous at best.
Plus of course ASIC never gets the funding it really should have, but you have to make budget cuts somewhere to make the books balance.
It is a dirty rule playing field, but we all need to know that or not play at all.
Hence the email group in trying to even up the playing field in just one stock, and trying to give confidence to the existing holders to not give away their shares when these tricks/games are played against us.
If you ever look properly at one of the big groups change of substantial holding forms, the ones that are 40+ pages long often. They sometimes include every trade made during the time of the changes in substantial holding. Providing you don't fall asleep reading it, it is interesting that when accumulating shares, there are often times in there when the sub holder sells a lot of shares in a short period, sometimes they borrow and lend shares as well, so they don't change by more than 1% too quickly.
Looking at a chart and the days when they are selling, though buying overall, is usually at crucial chart points, or they push a share down an extra couple of points below a previous low hoping to make holders and traders panic into selling (or buying if they are doing the opposite).
Is this manipulation or just trying to buy or sell at the best price? You wont get the answer from ASIC.
One way to beat them at the game is to not play. I do not have any stoplosses on my PLS shares at all, so I held all through the nearly 50% decline recently. In fact I added shares during the fall, but in the 60's IIRC. I unfortunately did not get the low 50's or 40's, but did months ago.
Writing 'doubt' in broker reports and leaks to the media are all part of the game. How else are they going to scare strong people out of their holdings?
PLS Price at posting:
62.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)