Having had a slight hiatus in my comments, time to make a...

Having had a slight hiatus in my comments, time to make a salient point again. One way to fix the sycophants (shorters) is not to set stop losses. If you match their activity to the price fluctuations, there is a strong correlation between their activity and the price. Whilst short selling is legal, it is highly unethical (does not stop these sycophants) and hurts the small investor considerably. If you take the trouble to look through the pages and pages of trades that are released some time after the event when we have forgotten about the movement, you will see considerable activity around the times of the sharp rises followed by rapid falls. This smacks of blatant price manipulation which IS illegal. The point here is that the shorters have borrowed copious quantities of shares in order not to sell immediately. This is borne out by the number of shares that are listed as 'shorted' (currently around 8.5 million and admittedly in decline) and the actual number that need to be 'covered'. By holding the 8.5 million shares, they are able to manipulate prices by loading up buy and sell sides accordingly. The pattern seems to be sell above around $4.20 so as to trigger all the stop losses that have been set and then gobble up what becomes available as stop losses are hit and then accumulate again and by sheer weight of numbers of shares held, crank the price back up to $4.20-$4.30 before repeating the cycle.

There sole intention appears to be just trade by manipulating the price because of the number they have available. For those of you who have taken the trouble to go through the pages and pages of trades (262 pages back in October when all this started) you will see hundreds of trades of 1 share and many times that amount that we as retail would not be able to trade as they would be 'not marketable parcels' or the brokerage would exceed the proceeds. My hypothesis is that the number of shares borrowed is purely to load up buy / sell sides depending on the direction they are taking at the time and only a very small percentage (around 10%) are actually 'hitting the market' at any one time. If this is true, then it would appear to be a blatant case of price manipulation but will never be called out by the ASX for reasons stated before in various posts.

I am NOT an accountant but I suspect a forensic accountant going through those lengthy documents and matching up with recorded trades for the day would illustrate exactly how the price is being manipulated but for us retail lads, we get the data reported only AFTER the event and it is difficult to obtain the daily trade data after the event. If there is an accountant out there with similar sentiments to me, then it would be interesting to save the daily data from the ASX and match it up with the data in these documents reporting the 'becoming or ceasing to be a substantial holder.' I am sure ASIC have the facilities to do this and the ASX but who do they care about more - retail or substantial holders?

Any thoughts? Or maybe I am just another disillusioned by the big guys making millions at the expense of the little guys trying to make their super stretch out until they no longer need it. I will say that as long as investors set stop losses, the more of this is going to happen. I am convinced that the big guys have access to the stop loss data and plan accordingly. Another wonderful example of the transparency in the market for everybody ... oops, except for the smoke and mirrors created by the big players.