You say: "I think you give too much weight to "flippers/traders"."
This is a total ''unknown". We have a pretty good clue that S&L has been largely responsible. But S&L has a finite (unknown) number of shares. For all we know, they have none left, or somewhere between 0 and 15-20M.
How many shares do flippers/traders have to work with? And they're selling, then buying, then selling. Impossible to quantify. How many are there? What are their action thresholds?
IMO, flippers/traders (due to our trend) are at least as big a threat as S&L. Perhaps far greater. Again, they buy, sell, buy, sell. S&L sells with no replenishment.
JMHO,
SGE