You could be right, lets look at a few things. Lets assume that you were one of these investors or contractors and you had shares to sell. Would you wait seconds before the close of the trading day and sell 100 shares below the bid? Would you start selling into the bid everyday at around lunchtime? When no news has changed anything would you constantly sell into the bid and continue this practice every time the bid drops? Would you spend days and weeks selling into the bid a few thousand shares at a time and every time the bid drops sell a few more thousand shares? If it were large block of 500K or more shares at a time consistently selling then I could agree with your thinking. It is the small share blocks that get sold into the bid and lower than the bid that lead me as well as most other longs that it is manipulation. If the MM's and hedge funds that started the shorting of TECO can bring us to our knees then they make a killing. No one from the SEC will look in on them down here in pennyland so why not NSS the stock and never have to worry about covering? Problem with that is we are turning things around. We are not the big guys on the block and our latest finds are very small compared to oil and gas production, I will give you that. The reason that myself and most other longs are pumped at this point is the direction we are going. After all the falling and failing we have done, we have finally leveled out and started the upward climb. It won't be easy because we dug ourselves into a huge hole. The good thing about that is the the MM's and hedge funds have fallen for the rope-a-dope. Even know Treaty did not plan the rope-a-dope it will work just the same. Or wait, did Treaty plan the rope-a-dope to blast the shorts out of the water. For this I guess we wait. The covering of NSS is what will cause this to skyrocket, not just the covering of regular shorts. All of this is just my opinion, of coarse