DNA Brands Inc (DNAX)

[Ed the Trader]

"Ed, if there are no new shares out yet, how are the MM's able to trade now?"

By virtue of being marketmakers, their responsibility is to make a market for a ticker, even if both a buyer and seller does not exist. Toward that end, a marketmaker is allowed to pretend that they have shares to sell even when they do not. The marketmakers usually has a limited period of time to produce the missing shares that they sold... something like three days... but if the marketmakers trade among themselves using imaginary shares, as long as they make sure everything is even at the end, they are all in the clear. In the meantime, as no one else likely has any shares yet which are freely tradable (although it seems that different brokers restore access to split shares after different periods of time... E-trade seems to be one of the worst in this regard), the marketmakers can use a very small amount of shares to control the price of the ticker between the execution of the split and whenever everyone else's shares once again become tradable.