General Discussion Topics, page-24997

It's interesting ...because I see those ' small parcels ' being as much an issue on the BUY side as they are on the SELL side.

Particularly when you note the observation that the CXXT center point trades or the ' mid point ' trades are in fact the BIGGER parcels by far going through.

And the reason that this is an important distinction is that with the mid-point trades , they are executed in the ' Dark Pool ' markets where neither side can see or has access to a transparent market depth. So you don't know who or how many is sitting there in the Dark markets looking to BUY or SELL.

So this is important because these larger orders going through at the mid-point prices appear more to be the influencing orders in maintaining the higher valuations because a.) they are clearly prepared to pay more if you think of it from the 17 cents level .....or less if you are looking at it from a sellers point of view from the 17.5 cents level ......and b.) the Buyer who is clearly willing to pay .25 of a cent more and who are clearly the larger orders are those who are more inclined to be accumulators.

This leaves the smaller more irregular and transparent orders that are going through at 17 or 17.5 are largely remainders of steadfast orders which keep getting interrupted by the ' unknown ' volumes in the dark pool which are prepared to pay more or less than the visible market participants of the ASX or Chi-x.

That's just the way I see it. However and when i look to BUY or SELL , especially in a tight low volume market , I always will try to obtain the midpoint pricing. And sometimes this will be difficult if your order is large . Imagine a BUY order of 1 million at the midpoint of 17.25 . At this rate , you'd be sitting there all day waiting for it to get filled. But if you're happy to wait then so be it.

The other thing about midpoint orders is that they are more difficult and time consuming for the operators if you use a broker to keep changing. So you would just leave them there. And another consideration is that they are wiped automatically at days end.....so there is no keeping them in the dark pool system for more than one day.

So in terms of ' Manipulation ' if its someone with an agenda to actually purposefully keep the SP at a certain trading level each and every day until there is an announcement , then YES there would and should be cause for concerns regarding ' Market Manipulations ' ....but if it is someone who just wants to accumulate with their larger and normal BEST PRICED order until it filled and in a low trading volume market , then I reckon that is more difficult to prove manipulation.

And this is the problem I think. Is this person or persons also buying at the 17 cent level . Could be. And they might even be buying at the 17.5 cent level as well. You just don't' know really. And you won't know until a buyer steps up and goes 18 - 18.5 on larger volume which may or may not trigger the midpoint accumulators to chase if their overall volume demands are quite large.

The brilliance of what we've been able to take away from these shenanigans so far is the lack of want or urgency to exit at below these new support levels which appear to now be set firmly at 17.0. Because , I assume they could drop it like anything else if they wanted to.