Recent Buying in Helix, page-6

Bad trading practices being facilitated
I'm drawing attention to a most unfortunate trading issue that has arisen in recent years, across many stocks - perhaps most - including Helix.
It is the practice of buying or selling trivial parcels of shares at prices different from the last traded price, with the intention of altering market price - which I've sometimes heard justified as 'price discovery'. It's not uncommon for such sales to be for $1 or so. My screenshots below are not like that but are of small transactions that changed the share price.

Sometimes it might be genuine: other times it is just manipulation, which of course is illegal but where are the regulators when you want them ... There have been court cases involving market manipulation that had a remarkable similarity to what most of us seen so many times. It is clear that the problem is not being properly investigated by ASIC - perhaps because it has become so widespread. That's a Fail.

ChiX didn't help
I don't recall it happening prior to ChiX becoming licensed to trade in Australia in late 2011 but perhaps it did but was more subtle. ChiX also led to arbitraging across both platforms (ASX <-> ChiX) which had some bad consequences that I won't go into here.

Loss of Broker ID codes was terrible
I thought it a terrible backward step, when stock broker ID codes no longer accompanied each order (as they used to be many years ago - roughly pre 2005 as I recall). At least then brokers could tell which firms were putting on each order. That gave a degree of industry scrutiny that's now lost. The rule was said to be changed to be fair to non brokers I think but that was namby pamby claptrap that ironically allowed trivial sized transactions, some of which were terrible for market integrity IMO. Now, it's not possible at the time, as far as I know, to tell which entity is putting on those ridiculous orders. I've seen orders for a couple of shares at a couple of cents each - even an order for less than 10c in total. That's not viable. You have to question the motivation.

Prevalence of dodgy orders led to over-reaction about market integrity with genuine and decent traders
Meanwhile, the rest of us - who cannot afford the brokerage to put on trivial orders - get some of our bona fide orders held up while dealing teams are investigating whether they comply with market integrity rules. The idea is good but it's not working properly. For example, recently there was a bid for around $100k of a stock which I wanted to sell some of. The bid was at 3% below the last sale price, which I was OK with. I decided to accept it so put in a Sell order for the matching quantity of stock, at the Bid price. That should have immediately executed. However my order was scrutinised for a while (I was told it was because of its size in relation to the typical orders in that stock and the ~ 3% price difference). While that nonsense was going on, others started to fill in the bid, so my genuine transaction was prejudiced by misguided excess zeal. Oh great. Meanwhile BS orders abound all around us.

Show broker ID - for transparency; will discourage manipulation
It would be much better for transparency if all traders were provided with a broker ID code from which we could tell who, for example, was putting on orders like the following. I can't comment on their bona fides - they might be ok - but market integrity would be much better if broker ID (not client ID) was revealed for each transaction.