You seem to be responding to a different point than the one I...

You seem to be responding to a different point than the one I was actually making.

The one that I was making is that no one can get inside the head of the millions of market participants and understand what people are doing and why - if one could, huge wealth would very quickly flow in their direction - so yes, people who claim this are projecting.

As for market manipulation through convincing other market participants to either buy or sell stock, that is another matter altogether. That occurs in two main ways, through companies' market sensitive announcements, and by brokers through advertising. The first seems to work a bit for a while but the strategy tends to become cold (counter productive) pretty quickly as market participants quickly realise a company is all sizzle and no sausage. The second is more tricky because it appeals to gullible people who get sucked in by pretty stories rather than considering business basics, like sales trajectory, time to profitability etc. However, it is also general advertising and makes some market participants aware of a stock that they weren't previously aware of. For small stocks, this can suddenly draw a lot of attention that can drive price action in a stock, particularly if the company does genuinely have good fundamentals, but again there has to be either many market participants diving in, or one big one.

This is actually the way I came to know of AL3 - there was a big announcement at the time, and after going through two years of announcement the company seemed like the real deal so I bought immediately. But even then, by my standards, I only nibbled at the stock putting in the minimum that I ever do. Then I waited and gathered more information, including about price movements. Although, I am not a small player, I kept my input modest and certainly did not buy enough stock to move the market. In that case, there was a sense of urgency, but usually there is not and any hype usually dies down in about a month offering reasonable entry points. In my case the advertising did work, but not until six months later when I felt more comfortable with the stock, and only then did I ramp up my holding by more than an order of magnitude. This kind of strategy is common among larger players, because they want to have a high level of confidence in a stock because getting out can be tricky (liquidity problems).

As for people being paid to post on HC, I find the idea absurd. With a few exceptions, most people on HC are small investors (large investors will usually have a circle of like minded people around them) and it is simply not cost effective to pay people to spruik stocks in this way. That is not to say there aren't plenty of people on the forum who hold a stock, have fallen in love with it, and make big claims about price - but they're pretty transparent because they don't offer a serious (or any) argument in favour of the stock. Furthermore, when people make claims about a stock (I did this on the other forum yesterday - saying the AL3 announcement should not be market sensitive because the information was already public) posters usually ask them to put up or shut up. In my case, I put up - so people could see I was providing genuine information.