Alright. After researching all day, I've come to the following conclusion. Yes, this was a blatant, manipulative bear raid. However, the bears simply used what was already available to orchestrate the crash.
Step 1: Buy 9000+ deep ITM calls (yesterday).
Step 2: Exercise options, so 9m+ shares are in account, giving you tons of shares without raising the PPS.
Step 3: Using level 3 info, start selling shares at the low ball GTC bids. It seems a lot of folks had $7 - 8 GTC bids hanging there just in case, and whoever orchestrated this sold right to them. This caused the next part, which is really brilliant...
Step 4: Selling into low ball GTC bids coincides with an incredible series of pre-existing stop losses in the $7 -8 area..
Step 5: The real landslide hits, with stop losses and continuous low ball selling rolling the PPS down to $6.17 within minutes.
Step 6: Accumulate super cheap long shares all the way down from stop losses, and all the way back up from $6.17.
At 13:40:53pm, just as the 5 minute halt came to a close and trading resumed, NASDAQ shows an immediate, singular 300,000+ share order @ 6.7/share, totaling around $2m of capital moved. Somebody had a 2 million dollar bid just waiting at the $6 level. It is the first trade registered right as trading resumed. Check it out for yourselves on NASDAQ. All the other singular orders during the day didn't even cross 10,000 at once. Most are in the hundreds or single thousands. The only single trade all day that reached 6 digits at once was this one, waiting right at the bottom.
So, in short, the bears used stocks gained from exercised options, pre-existing low-ball GTC orders, and stop losses to pull the price all the way down to the low sixes, where a $2m order was waiting.
They basically used retail investors' own strategies against us. I know a lot of folks put in low ball GTC orders just in case, and tons more had stop losses all the way down to $6. This coincides precisely with Roth Capital's defense of what really happened today: stop losses and retail panicking. The bears just had to light a fire to the tinder, and the whole thing blew up in smoke within seconds.
A lot of people got robbed today, legally. Unreal. But brilliantly executed...
