A very big issue for investors and traders in the markets right now is naked shorting by market makers. According to the DTC and SEC, they are not quite sure naked shorting even exists and they state that if it does exist it only makes up a very small amount of the monetary volume through the system every day. But independent researchers have looked into it and found that many companies, Bear Sterns, etc have been taken down by naked short selling and the level of FTDs in the system is approaching about 16% of the volume daily (on every exchange). Even with a DTC "chill" (T4T), the foreign firms and/or hedge funds or brokerages who do not use the DTC to clear and settle their trades, can naked short ad infinitum, as often as they wish and for as much as they want. The only limitation is in not going overboard to the point of making it too obvious, which itself is a moving target, because they want to steal as much money as possible away from the market but also do not want to have their crony ATM machines (trading vehicles) locked up by the SEC or DTC. So they NSS as much as they can and systematically sell phantom shares over and over for 100% profits with no real intention of ever delivering what they sold because all they sold was a share entitlement, an electronic marker which eventually turns into a failure to deliver which just sits on the proprietary books for years and years and never gets covered (delivered to the buyer). The best scenario for them is that after doing this for months and years, every trader and/or investor who has ever invested in that ticker is wiped out and finally gives up owning it and so liquidity dries up, volume shrinks, the PPS is cellar boxed and the company eventually dies on the vine because management effectively does not have access to the capital markets any longer. This mostly hits start up companies. Established companies like Overstock.com have had to deal with it before and while it did not push them to bankruptcy, it still caused them significant capital losses for the company in fighting it, not to mention all the investor capital destroyed by it; probably money that was funneled overseas and sits in the Cayman Islands somewhere. 
No one can know at any time who is "selling". Most would immediately assume the company itself, diluting, etc. Or institutional investors like Ironridge, dumping. Or company insiders with pref shares, or foolhardy traders or longs just capitulating and dumping. But many people do not realize or consider that it very well could be foreign and/or non-DTC market players who have access and the mechanical ability to naked short sell on a massive scale. They can absorb nearly all of the bids for stock with phony electronic shares and trades are executed but those accounts never receive any legit real shares. People on the boards are always wondering about "...where are all these shares on the Ask coming from...", well, they good be legit real shares for sale, they could be legit borrowed shares shorted and placed on the Ask or dumped on the bid, or they could just be phony IOUs by naked short sellers. The problem is we cannot know the true extent of the problem because we cannot even get proper short sale figures and for researching possibly NSS, we do not have accurate failure to deliver metrics. The bashers always seem to want us to prove that there is NSS going on, well, ask the SEC and DTC or FINRA because we lowly pions cannot get a hold of the internal FTD numbers and while the Freedom of Information Act could force a court to demand those documents, an additional problem is most of the FTDs occur in so called ex-clearing arrangements which are between private firms. If say both parties are foreign brokerage houses NSS'ing and shuffling to each other, those figures can never be known because they each forgive each others FTDs, all the while both firms are profiting off of the 100% proceeds from "stock" sales which are really just air shares to the market. Its straight up fraud, and do not be naive and think it does not happen. It is rampant and it is probably happening in RFMK. Every stock on the market is vulnerable because of the holes in the regulations and enforcement. PK stocks are the most vulnerable. If you think that it is conspiracy and non-existant then just go take a look sometime on the FINRA website, under the section about "compliance" - monthly enforcement actions. The list is quite interesting, its a rapsheet of the largest firms caught monthly not reporting the proper short sales and also caught naked shorting left and right and getting small fines and a slap on the wrist while they probably made hundreds of millions in each of the scams. Stay sharp out there, GL.
The dark side clouds everything, difficult to see the future is.
$RFMK
