On market manipulation. (who *really* know what that is?)
Any thoughts as to why the Australian Securities and Investment Commission regularly prosecutes and jails retail traders/investors for 'marking the price' of a stock, presumably with small orders of a hundred dollars or so, yet despite numerous complaints by retail investors in BND about institutional manipulation of the share price of Bandanna Energy, ASIC never even 'has a word' with the traders in question, never mind puts a stop to it or even more unthinkably: prosecutes an institutional trader?
I mean retail shareholders must be tired of receiving fob off letters from ASIC when they complain about a single shares for 10.5c being dropped on the market at close.
Retail investors must be tired of watching a plethora of market manipulation trades everyday undertaken by algos and institutional and foreign traders, with all complaints ignored and any attempt by themselves to behave in the way the rest of the market is behaving threatened with prosecution?
I challenge anyone here to sell a single share on the closing auction of any stock to knock the price down a couple of times. I can guarantee you, you will be sent to jail, yet the traders from the institutions from which ASIC gets its staff remain unmolested.
Why is this?
How can there be one set of laws applied harshly to retail traders and never applied to institutional and foreign traders?
Is it just that they are easy targets? Is it because of legal jurisdiction?
Perhaps Australians should be trading in the US markets where they too will be untouchable and leave the Australian markets to be raped by foreign traders?
Clearly ASIC's methods are NOT working and are discriminatory against retail traders resident in Australia. Probably because they have no jurisdiction with firms and traders based largely overseas and the local retail traders fold easily as they do not have deep pockets.
Yet, what ASIC DOES have the ability to do; something that will have a major impact in stabilizing behaviour across ALL types of participants in the Australian public markets is, with a minor change in law, is to temporarily block access from the market from anyone deemed to be engaging in manipulation.
This is going in EXACTLY the opposite direction from what is currently proposed which will again be discriminatory to local residents.
This temporary market participation ban can be easily be rolled out to ASX/CHi-X interfaces by participant ID and ASIC can simply black-ball a participant id for 24 hours for each offence.
This avoids the requirement to take expensive 'criminal' action, which in effect will only ever be taken against retail Australian residents, but serves the purpose of quickly getting everyone into line as ....
What ALL traders value FAR MORE than their ability to manipulate the market, is their ability to PARTICIPATE in it.
It should be pretty obvious to ASIC that if it only ever has success prosecuting small time retail 'crooks' while the bulk (+90%) of all price manipulation on the market is perpetrated by untouchables, then it need to change it's strategy.
