Can you list specifically who is manipulating? Names or individuals or companies?
Adage Capital Partners.
Can you give me any specific methods they use to manipulate?
They buy a small (relative to other investments, but medium-large relative to the stock itself) holding, leveraging their prior reputation as a successful hedge fund in order to spur buying interest. They use that buy side momentum to build a short position that offsets their long position's risk and also monetizes the time spent waiting for clinical progress. Following some early success in eliminating risk for the short position, they then use the interim returns from the short position itself to fund HFT algorithms that recycle those short shares and push the price down. See all ebbs and flows of short interest since mid-2015.
The tool they use is HFT. They have the most funds available to project force using HFT, relative to any other party holding the stock; this means they are always in control. They use that HFT to constantly put up bids/asks all over the place near the spread, with the result being that traders and "other HFTs" get bullied into canceling, selling, etc. They also do it the other way, bullying traders and other HFTs into buying when they want to push the price up while shorting into the rise.
Recall that the initial investment is "small" relative to most companies, but "large" relative to Advaxis itself. This means that they are firmly entrenched and it would require equally "large" investments to dislodge them. The problem then is that few institutions are going to be willing to take a "large" risk like they did (they got in on the cheap because they went through the company itself). And retail can't do anything about it either because they lack the ability to act as a single unit. The situation is self-reinforcing and fewer institutions will want to jump in as what is happening becomes clearer. Plus whatever they do in the back room.
At the same time, they hold millions of warrants with a fixed exercise price that largely offset the risk of the common stock "getting away" from them and making it impossible to cover. They can just convert the warrants instead and cover that way in that scenario.
So we're left with watching them steal the money and hoping that they also want to run it the other way when they're done. It was destined to happen all along.
Not even going to touch my thoughts on how the company is helping this happen.
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