Any thoughts as to why ASIC 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 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. 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?
Clearly ASIC's methods are NOT working and are discriminatory. Probably because they have no jurisdiction with firms and traders based largely overseas.
Yet, what ASIC does have the ability to do, with a minor law change is to temporarily block access from the market from anyone breaking Australian law. This can be easily be rolled out to ASX interfaces and ASIC can simply black-ball a participant id for 24 hours for each offence. This avoids the requirement to take 'criminal' action but servers the purpose of quickly getting everyone into line as by far what these 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.
