The trading in ARIA is dramatically affected by the HFTs. It's a $3 stock. Few retail buyers/sellers would trade it 100 shares at a time, due to commissions. So all these 100 share rapid fire trades that show up a few dozen in a second are institutional. It could be an institution buying or selling its holdings through a HFT broker/trader. But on trading days when the volume is 1MM +/-, it's most likely just HFT sucking out a few pennies here and there, whipsawing the price, adding artificial volatility and reducing liquidity by moving the bid/ask away from smaller players. It's price manipulation in its purest form, worse than the football field sized trading floor of 50-200 hyenas. Now its 2 blood suckers, 2 programmers, a network guy, a computer and some capital, and virtually zero trading costs as they self clear. They must be roped in somehow on these smaller cap stocks like ARIA. Wake up SEC.
This morning they must be tuning their algorithms. They are less a factor, with 35K shares traded in hour one. As those 100 share trades start flying by and we trade below the 1.5MM mark or so, you know they are back to sucking blood.
I wonder where we we be if they weren't around? Where would the market be? Maybe higher, maybe lower, but at least the valuation would be an unmanipulated reflection of what true investors believe.
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