I've observed what I believe to be a pattern over several months: when volatility here picks up, the quantity of HFT-driven 100 share trades absolutely explodes, seemingly to conceal the actual trading activity. And it almost always gets pegged to a specific price, like it is now.
The question for me, though, is one of chicken or egg: is the volatility itself engineered? If you signal a wipe of the order book in PM/AH trading and it has a downstream effect that causes pending buy orders and other HFTs to back off for the trading day, then it's very easy to cause a huge drop in price at the open with only a relatively small number of shares. Then the HFT holds it there and generates an overwhelming amount of churn that makes it impossible to determine what's actually happening.
I bet only 1-1.5M of this trading is real, if even that.
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