Well, sorry to have caused you so much stress this week. I always find the spread issue annoying as I usually pick stocks with minimal "spread padding", so to speak. I would say that at least 50% of the time contests are determined one way or another by bid/ask activity. It's usually much more subtle than my move, but if you look closely at trades it often has a significant effect. Sometimes, there are good moves with legitimate stocks but with a bid/ask 30% gain underneath it all.
Anyway, the trades were placed kind of on a whim on Monday after noticing the situation on the weekend. I didn't expect to get a win out of it, unless some funny business developed. In a sense I saw myself as limiting that. When volume suddenly picked up on Thursday, I did put 5000 shares for sale at .17, and someone immediately bought 1000 of them. At this point you got excited and warned against .19 painting. I was not the one who bought 600 shares at .19 in the morning, and suspect it was the same person who sold 300 shares twice during the day.
I think it was someone who has an issue with another competitor.
What I wonder is, what would you have done if I had not made the trades, and the same scenario happened at .17. Three thousand shares did trade at .17, and it had been .17 two weeks ago.
It's possible that I shifted the eventual outcome.
So, I just want to calm down now. Congrats to the winner, be it Kookie or Researcher, both of whom played an outstanding game. Thanks as always to you for all the work you go through running the contest and again, sorry for the stress.
