IL Padrino, I read the "Electronic Day Trader" it told how mm's work. The rest of what I learned has been on the net. Do a search of "naked short trading" . Basically, the mm's short a stock to "make a market". When you place an order the mm's don't always have shares to sell you, so they "borrow" the shares temporarily, sell them to you and then buy the shares for real from someone else hopefully at a lower price than they sold them to you. They are allowed to do this. Now, sometimes they get carried away and never buy the shares for real. There ends up being possibly billions of phantom shares out there.amoungst the real shares that the co. has authorized. The mm's do this to weak co. in the hopes that they will go under, then the mm's never have to cover. However, if the co. appears weak (ctkh was at .0001) the mm's will naked short the stock and gads of phantom shares will be in the market, we could be owning some of those and not know it. If the co. strengthens instead of weakens, the pps goes up, the mm's are holding all these shorted shares that they are now forced to cover as soon as possible because the pps is rising rapidly. But, you and I are not selling any shares, they can't cover at a low price as they had hoped and the motha of short squeezes starts. Lars
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