Need to put on my tin foil hat to protect my brain on that one. As it involves trying to think dark to speculate . After looking at the time and sales. Nothing really fits for the days trading.
But; while running a manipulative run, many times the dark master or he and a friend uses two or several trading accounts to wash trades and walk price direction by trading between accounts.
Usually, when this happens, it happens in the same day. Wash trading can do 2 things, increase volume greatly (sometime double it) and create either direction continuation. You see this more during an attention pop or pre the real run, during accumulation. The goal is to gain interest and accumulate shares used to sell in the real run. It's not needed much once the retail herd is on board. (hooked)
Because they want to gain attention by creating a huge volume and price spike in the chart to draw attention, or hook the herd once they show up. And nothing works better then buying and selling large block orders between oneself. To double volume and acquire shares before a run, while holding price tight. Action begets action.
Using this trick he will sell from one account at bid and buy at ask with the other. Usually larger then retail size trades, which get tic by tic watcher all excited seeing block trades continuing the run. Then 10 15 minutes later he will reverse the accounts and buy from the other and sell with the other, basically washing the original large block order out.
This can be seen several times during the day and any difference because of bid ask trade price in rising price is settled at the EOD. Many times after hours with a "T" trade.
Ever read message boards touting "look at that huge 10 mil buy at ask"? Well if they watched the time & sales, looking for smaller matching trades, which add up to the huge one. They would see this within less the a 1/2 hour. Some thing like 5 2mil trades at bid. or even several 500k burst trades which add up, with a 1 mil here or there. The retail herd miss the smaller ones, but see the big ones. And most have no idea what or why a burst trade happens. So it goes thru without mention. Pennylanders feel the big one meant something very positive. Because someone just dumped a large chunk of cash into the stock. When all that happened was wash trades between accounts.
This did not happen on Friday. But it's possible the 45 mil at 3 pm was a wash trading settle for the past 3 days of active volumes.
Only thing I can guess is a wash trading settle, but for several days rather then daily. Since over 400 mil was traded over the past 4 days, it possible 45 mil at bid .0009 settled the account balance discrepancy. Far from sure this is what happened. But the subject is interesting anyway. And many have no idea this takes place.
