I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but in today's RAC...

I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but in today's RAC trading I noticed something I've never seen before, in any stock. Consistently over the day, whenever a buyer bid up the price (i.e. executed a buy at market), there followed a small sell at market immediately after, so close in timing that it was in exactly the same second as far as the trade record, to push the price immediately back down again. Just two examples below:



You can see here at 15:56:07 the price was pushed straight back down to $3.24 from the buy at $3.25. Seven seconds later at 15:56:14, the buyer cleared out asks at $3.25, $3.26 and $3.27 and took a bite of $3.28, and the price was immediately pushed back down again to $3.24, all within that same second. The 4 cent drop was the most extreme example I saw, but there may have been others. This was happening consistently all day (whenever I was looking at least).

As I said I've never seen this with RAC or any other stock (or if I have it was not done so regularly and overtly that I paid attention to it), and I've seen a lot of price action through the years. I'm assuming based on the speed of execution and the very small size of the sell trades that this is automated in one way or another. I'm not sure whether it's the same party doing the buy and sell (which could explain how they get the timing so close), or whether it's possible to submit and execute a sell order so quickly after someone else's buy (i.e. it's separate parties doing each order). In either case, it looks like the intent is to make the price look weaker than it otherwise would be.