I understand your opinion from a materialist perspective- and I also get that as a retailer with limited understanding of the movement of equities at a corporate level that you'd be inclined to believe that what you see is what you get- efficient/ fair markets blah blah.
Every fund that I know of/ have ever been involved with has a small / micro cap team, and each team has a dedicated broker aligned with achieving their position targets.
As a very simple piece of outlier data- you can see in the ss below- on 3 separate occasions- a short position has been built over several days to the amount of exactly 1,407,036 units each time, on the 3rd, 9th and 12th /11, then closed the following day. Seems a little out of the ordinary no? At least a few std deviations away at least?
I wouldn't underestimate the complexity of shorting a low float stock. Its not the same as opening up derivatives with your favourite broker against a more liquid stock.
As a final note- if the argument is to be made that - 'oh fine- its just someone (maybe or maybe not an insto) shorting & not accumulating/ manipulating', then bro the implied outcome for this trade is dog shit tier. They've made (maybe) 10% profit with literally infinite risk- on 3 occasions. No retailer / semi sophisticated trade is shorting that these levels- theres no juice left in it. The only argument that you could have made for garden variety market activity here, is saying that a noob trader (given no rational person would short here) has somehow got hold of a broker willing to facilitie over 200k $AUD of shorts and they've gotten lucky 3 times in the span of 2 weeks. All meticulously planned and executed at very key technical and fundamental levels...
The more likely answer (in my opinion), is that shorting at these levels becomes a very lucrative notion if considering that the shorter is harvesting units on the long side from actual retailers. Because then you're looking down the barrel of infinite returns on cheap shares.
Would love to hear hard evidence to prove there is no institutional involvement here- or if its one of you nongs secretly shorting it, maybe you can introduce me to your broker hehe.
(20min delay)