They play games, we lock up the shares for good. Float is too...

They play games, we lock up the shares for good. Float is too low here for them to try the typical games used to manipulate the ASX. I think this is more likely a trader trying to make profits than any concerted effort to manipulate. But it's a dangerous game cause imagine if the announcement drops. Though you never go broke selling at a profit so if they want to only make small pips all power to them.

Generally on the ASX shorting is not the primary tool they use to keep something down. It is used for stop loss hunting, in conjunction with a variety of tactics. Witnessed it on a stock last year (which is very exciting fundamentally) that got hit by first a pump (which actually got the thing onto my radar) but then a coordinated tanking.

Basically long story short there were 5 drill holes planned and the stock's drilling is seasonal. 3 drill holes hit fantastic and mineralization is open in all directions. The fires around Yellowknife forced an evacuation so 5th drill hole cancelled and around the same time the 4th hole was a duster.

Now normally if that had not happened it would have gone down a little bit as a pullback from the over exuberance, but the organic bad news provided the perfect chance for several things to all happen in conjunction, feeding into each other.

- Stop loss hunting, both by a small % of shorts used to accelerate & people genuinely dumping their positions to buy back lower
- Tons of people popping up to post negativity for the first time ever posting. Some were traders or genuine bears but some posted edited drilling results for example. ASIC violation shit that got moderated, but I'm sure a few lazy investors got caught by it.
- Churning like crazy in obvious patterns
- The bad news putting a damper on positive sentiment


The news that did come out with the duster and fires was always organically bad and was going to cause a pullback, but because of the above they successfully swung it even lower. I'm not complaining because thanks to them my average is substantially lower and as a long term investor I did not really care as much about the price (as I found it in an acceptable range) but obviously lower is better.

I bring this up to point out that given the right circumstances they don't need a massive short % to really tank something. Just enough to trigger stop losses and accelerate an existing downward trend by dumping into key resistance points.

This kind of thing would never work here for obvious reasons.