I think the bottom line is that most people who have been around the markets for a long time will tell you that things do not look right. I am not one to say that everytime some distressed hedgefund unloads a position, or if we get a counterintuitive move, that it MUST be manipulation and only that explains things. But the overall pattern is what matters.

For example, note the number of times that ECU starts off a trading session in the red. Go back through months of trading, regardless of whether the rest of the sector is up or down, or the background news is good or bad. If we see ECU is always pushed down right off the bad to set the tone for the session, then one might question what is going on. And if further investigation revealed the same collection of houses that were doing most of the selling, even though they do not represent typical retail trading institutions, more warning flags might go off.

Also, the execution of the trades is also suspect. One would expect that a trader will want to realize the best price for a sell order. If heavy selling is triggered at specific times of day, and geared such that it takes the stock down through critical support levels, or takes out all the bid depth in a weak market, then it is obvious that the trader involved is NOT attempting to secure the best price through the trades. So that begs the question, to whom would it be worth it to lose money on a trade in order to ensure that the stock trades lower?

Sure, it could be the mother of all coincidences that some retail schmucks all line up at exactly the same critical times to hit market sell orders. I dont believe in coincidences, and I would be that an investigation will reveal that a small group of institutions are behind most of the big trades, and their behaviour is designed specifically to induce more selling and drive the stock lower.

There are more clever trading scams that have been busted in the past and one could easily have written each of them off because they left no obvious proof until an investigation was launched. Yet we hear of one filthy group after another being exposed these days. How much 'proof' could anyone have provided about the famous late trading scam that was exposed a few years ago in the mutual fund industry? The average investor does not have access to that info and until the regulators got off their asses and looked into it, no one could have done anything more than realize something was not right in the big picture. I think it is amazing that some people refuse to accept that manipulation may be part of the story.

cheers!

mike