Level 2 Observations - Bid vs Ask.
As a full-time trader watching Level 2 throughout the day, I thought some might find the following helpful.
On February 16, 472M shares changed hands - almost all at .0001.
Most of these did not go to "normal retail" investors - there was only about 170M on the bid at .0001 at the time - multiple large lots (99M chunks) went through that did not appear on the ask at .0001 for the taking. Perhaps it was a pre-arranged deal to take shares off the hands of a convertible debt seller.
I tried immediately to slap the odd 1M / 2M (AON) that appeared on the ask at .0001 - I only got a few of them totaling 5M.
I also put in a few 5M / 10M AON bids (that don't show in the bid totals) - before the 34M bid that became visible after it went back to .0001 x .0002. Just one of these eventually filled on March 4 after a further 13 trading days.
Since March 2, the bid has been at 326M>350M for the last 5 trading days - the largest element is CSTI with 290M+. There will undoubtedly be other hidden AON bids with all the retail MMs - people like me who use the tax lot trading system rather than "first buy / first sell" prefer whole million chunks. So anyone placing a new bid going forward would be way down all the queues.
There have only been 4 days where a few people might have got a reasonable fill on the ask: February 18: 43M - of which 18M went to a poster here; February 23: 14M; February 25: 18M; March 4: 21M.
The Ask at .0002 has been reducing - below 80M on March 4 - with only about 50% in GTCs - that indicates that those tempted to flip might cancel if they think they can do better. It also indicates that everyone who has got .0001s did not put them up to sell at .0002 in GTCs. Of course, the majority who bought .0001s without hesitation wanted them to average down from a much higher figure and will only sell much higher.
Unless there is a convertible debt sell into the .0001s, the chance of getting any / many is not high in my opinion.
So for longs who haven't averaged down yet, you perhaps might not want to pin all your hopes on filling on the bid. Although we don't know how much more might get put up at .0002 when the ask is slapped, 100M goes pretty quickly when it gets hit for 10M>25M at a time.
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To illustrate how quickly thinks can happen - look at AHIX today.
Walked all the way down from .0025>no bid - including relentless 100Ms per day convertible debt selling into the .0001s - with nobody buying .0001s on the ask - over several weeks.
Several days of longs bidding for .0001s and not getting them.
Today from 68M on the ask at .0002 at the open > 20M on the ask at .0006 at the close on 269M volume.
Most slaps were 3M>9M - not many per .0001 - almost no flipping on the way because people buying needed to average down from mainly the .0010>.0015 range and only managed to get a few .0008/7/6s on the way down.
Any impatient flipper who did undercut the ask after it had already upticked got slapped without hesitation.
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