Hi SCD, Not conjecture on your part by any means, it is called a...

Hi SCD,
Not conjecture on your part by any means,
it is called a PANCAKE PLAY and I first read about it a few years ago in a book joint written by two American brokers who also trained traders,
your description is adequate simply stack the sell side so any sellers must sell under your stack and you simply hoover them up, common to put a floor in also to catch any panic as you do not want to do too much damage , after all you do not want to have to wait to long for the price to recover,
hence about three lines of heavy sell orders just far enough away from the action to not suffer to much damage and a line or two of buy orders just under the action with a play area of about two lines in the centre.
Other brokers of course are well aware of who has the play on and there is often a genlemans agreement as to how far they can push it down before other brokers will start buying.
Had you been watching OXR yesterday ( and not for the first time ) you would have seen a play get almost out of control and they had to pull their first two lines of sells and stack the buy side with at one stage three at least U's to make the buy side look stronger, they obviously did not want the price to panic under 100 /101.
Logical time to accumulate PNA at the moment as it has just made a technical breakout but I doubt they will want to push it back into it's old down trending trading range.

cheers falko.