Charts are just a historical record of price, Hingdog. They are only predictive after the fact, looking through your retrospectoscope. In particular STX, looking at the chart, has more peaks and troughs than the Himalayas. Very frustrating for long term holders, also. It doesn't matter what time scale you are working on, daily, weekly, monthly it is just about completely untradeable for trend traders. Yes, it does go up for a while but within that 'upness' there are rarely channels, the price will go outside the channels either way very frequently. Trend reversals are usually without any warning - just look at your own chart. Take a piece of blank paper and slide it from left to right across your screen to obscure the 'future'. If you are honest, you can't tell the difference at any turning point between a reversal and just a downwards dip out of the channel which is going to whipsaw you.
Your emphasis on Volume also misleads you. Here it's not an indicator of conviction. Where your arrows point exactly equals STX's time in the ASX200 Index. With increased bot and algo action, every single little trade of theirs is also going into the Volume statistics. It's largely false volume, each bot trading back and forth between itself. An autistic savant computer. Whether that will die down to some extent when we get booted from the ASX200 and many players are forced to lose interest in us, I don't know. I do know though that going into the ASX200, STX's price was on a downtrend for about a month prior. "Keeping it low before entry to sell higher to the Index Tracking Funds" was the accepted wisdom. Yeah, well now that we are pretty dead set going to exit, it's trending down again, even in the face of several items of positive news. Maybe it's just Booth, I don't know.
The ASX just washes its hands of algo trading, "nothing to see here", I live in hope that ASIC is already investigating to get inside these programs. This will also ultimately result in the ASX being investigated [yet again] for failing to protect the integrity of their Market, which has become something worse than a Casino. At least a properly run Casino has transparent rules for their games of chance. The ASX has rules but they are being circumvented on a massive scale while the 'House' turns a blind eye. I doubt ASIC has the technical capacity to do such an in depth investigation, though.
With the weight of algo trading every single day in STX [and many other companies], the bots as a discrete force certainly have the capability to push the price around, and they do. At least 70% of trading every day lately during normal market hours is HFT. Are they the equivalent of human trading? Not if you can just program a bot to "take the share price down to 14 cents so I can profit handsomely" and the sheer volume of its downtick trading can make it so over time. That's pretty much the definition of market manipulation. And with no reference to fundamentals whatsover.
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