On Level II, you see all of the MMs stacked up on the bid and the ask. VCFM is one of the main ones that seems to be controlling the price over the past few days. They keep showing huge asks, which tend to act like a scary wall to people who are thinking of buying, since they probably figure their small ask slap won't make much difference, and that the price will keep pushing down anyway. It makes it look like someone is relentlessly unloading shares all day long. But if you watch carefully, they'll show say 10K on the ask, and then someone might buy 100 or 200 shares on the ask, and the 10K instantly disappears or changes into some other much smaller number. Then a few seconds later, it goes back to 10K again. But you can see in the time/sales streamer, that only 100 or 200 shares got bought. So I think they're just putting it there to look scary, with no real intention of selling tens of thousands of shares over and over, like it looks if you just look at it casually. And it scares some people into selling. They're also on the bid, usually with a smaller bid. But their bid seems real, while their ask seems fake. I think it's just a ploy for them to be able to accumulate a lot of shares at a reduced price. But it's probably not quite that simple, since it's some complicated high speed trading algorithm that's making all of its split second decisions. A lot of these high speed computerized traders don't actually care where the price goes, as long as they're able to make little 1 or 2 cent profits over and over all day long.
Sometimes a market maker is working for itself, and sometimes it's working for a bunch of clients. And often a market maker is selling on behalf of another market maker, who is maybe trying to conceal their identity. And there's trades between market makers that maybe we don't even see. It's kind of a shady business. When you see a trade which is some goofball number like 9.274502, it's not a normal person trading, it's a computerized MM trading.
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