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User336447

06/18/13 1:03 AM

#3051 RE: User336447 #3050

What I'm trying to get at is whether there is a manipulative strategy for bid whacking, say, if you want a price of a stock to be low... is there some way to make the MMs work for you.

Scenario: If you were already holding a large amount of a stock and you wanted the share price to be as low as possible so you could buy more at a cheap price. You were keen on accumulating as much as you could, but didn't want to alert anyone to your actions. You would place a large AON sell order below the bid or even just at the bid. This action would cause the MMs to start working to buy your large sell order because they would know that there was little chance of a single person being able to make that trade. So, the MM would start shorting into bids or setting ask sizes (short) that folks would hit (the ask size would be small, but may not change because A. they didnt want to scare people off with a large size and B. they could sit there absorbing as much buy pressure as possible before it dried up).

Say the AON seller canceled the order before the MM got enough to make the full trade... Would that AON seller be able to get away scot-free without having to pay anything for the amount of sell pressure they just created? Perhaps then, the MM would have to cover on the open market, so one could reason that it was equal in the end... But, by that time the AON seller would have created a negative stir in the market which would no doubt cause others to sell! Therefore they have initiated the rolling of a snowball of selling at no cost to them. Once the MM covered, they could repeat the process, thus laddering down a stock without ever selling a share.

Is that possible???
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cintrix

06/18/13 9:19 AM

#3053 RE: User336447 #3050

mm's don't generally show aon's. AON's aren't priority. If the mm's want your order they will buy it from you - they don't need to do what you explained. Don't forget that they don't always have to have a buyer with a seller. They can use their own inventory too. If you placed an aon order and the mm wanted it, they could buy it from you and add it to their inventory.