G'day Bori,Hard to say to be honest and that is why they are...

G'day Bori,
Hard to say to be honest and that is why they are used. it can be a head game however the player would want to be careful.

In my view the most common use would be to execute a much larger trade over a period of time so as not to upset the price level.

For example - you want to offload 20M shares and if you put a sell order on of that size you will create a wave of selling as smaller investors panic and traders smell a buy back opportunity at a lower price. So you feed crumbs into the depth over a periods of hours, days or even weeks if the order is large enough.

Players who use large parcels to "spook" traders and small holders are more obvious so if they put their bid in and then remove it they look pretty obvious. Then again this is loose as you can always claim you are trading and changed your mind - quite legitimate.

My tip - don't take any notice of Bots it is a distraction and you can't really 'know' in the end anyway.

I hope this assists. Best regards,
CW