From the mouth of a former market maker Once the MM is caught short and the strength of the buy is overpowering the MM will want to cover his short position. So the MMs call up one of his friendly MMs and says some like "the weather is sure rough today." The MM along with the other "friendly MM initiates a down tick about the same time. Now this can also be done with a certain amount of shares such as an infamous 100 shares flag. This down tick gives the illusion of weakness designed to hopefully begin the bear raid of selling. The fickle, fearful, day trader, momentum and short term begin to sell out allowing the MM to cover his short position at lower prices. They will move it down quickly to get it to a price of least financial damage. Problem they have is long-term investors in the OTC BB. They start accumulating and buying comes flying in when they take it too far thus the MMs took it to the point of volume again and not only investors the other MMs step in the make money on the spread.
Alas the poor MM does not get to cover. Now comes various tactics like stalling, boxing, or even locking the Bid and Ask for a while.
Of course, MMs aggressively deny any sort of collusion designed to fix quotes or spreads, but a recent SEC investigation tells another story.
MMs have a vast resource of tactics and it would take probably more than my lifetime to figure them all out.
So how do investors somehow manage to overcome the obvious deception in OTCBB arena? One answer is indirection trading style by going long which the MMs do not expect. In the war between investors and public companies on the OTC BB vs the MMs, if the MMs have all the advantages due to position or other factors, direct confrontation such as momentum or day trading hitting the stock is a definite death sentence.
