My understanding is there is one well known poster on this board that has admitted to being caught painting the tape along with other activities which resulted in some of their brokerage accounts either being closed or flagged for misuse.
And to your question, no, painting the tape does not indicate strength. It's typically done to either (a) portray false strength to trick others into buying or (b) keep closing share price up to get more favorable conversions on toxic loans. The latter, however, is a non-issue with Mexus as all of their most recent toxic notes had language that used average of the two lowest intraday trades to set the conversion rate and not the closing rate.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
