very nicely articulated post .. kudos 4kids

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I re-read your original post as well as this new one, and you are conflating lowball bids with bids placed at the 52-week low. This is just not the case. I also do not believe that selling at the bid is greater than buying at the ask. That isn't what I see when I watch the bid/ask on my streamer. I definitely do NOT see selling pressure.

Several people have posted here repeatedly over the years that they are putting in lowball bids, and their definition is perhaps a nickel under the last trade. (They have posted what their bid is, or they have PM'ed me privately, and I can attest to this being the case.) This is a far cry from putting a bid at the 52-week low. A lowball bid and a bid at the yearly low are in no way the same thing.

I have looked at the Level 2 both at otcmarkets.com and at my broker's site, and there are often some sizable bids at prices from a penny or two to about a nickel below the last trade. These are most certainly lowball bids by any reasonable definition, and they are not at the 52-week low. I have noticed that my bids usually do not show up on Level 2, and others have told me the same thing. Thus, I think there is actually much more buying interest than what we individual traders are allowed to see.

My statement stands and is correct: when those sizable lowball bids are placed, they make it much more difficult for market makers to plunge the stock down and take people's stops out. (remember, I think it is FOOLISH to have stops in on a stock like this.)
When a stock has been attacked as IPIX has, it is good for stability of the stock price to have those lowball bids in, which make it hard for manipulators to take the stock down significantly on low volume and at low cost to the manipulators. If they are determined to take it down, they will have to fill many thousands of shares at prices that should be painful to them, because they will have to short stock to fill those lowball bids.

Those lowball bids are not hurting the stock; they give it stability. In fact, constantly buying at the ask gives the market makers an incentive to keep raising the ask, selling to the suckers at the high of day (by shorting), and then taking the stock down and covering at lower levels.

As far as buying at the ask and your supply/demand idea -- this might be true in a situation where the stock price had not been attacked by an avowed shortseller through articles, a frivolous lawsuit, and FUD posted on other websites. But, many long-time shareholders have witnessed much manipulation in the stock price. All you have to do is look at the closing trades yesterday and today -- the bids went in at the ask, and the trades crossed at a lower price than the ask. How is buying at the ask helping the stock price, when the market makers are determined to sell the stock at less than the ask?

Just as there is little real buying pressure right now, there is also little real selling going on. The long-time investors are not selling at these prices. And, many of them are fully invested already.

The volume we are seeing now is much, much less than the average from even two weeks ago. We've been seeing volume of around 100k shares or less, instead of the 270k shares that was the average for a long time.

I think we are now seeing what the "real" volume is, when there are not a bunch of churning trades. And we've also seen a pattern of the stock price being up for much or most of the day, and then a final trade that prevents it from closing at the price it traded at up until the very end.

The time to buy at the ask is when we have news, new eyeballs are on the stock, and new investors are buying. Until that time, those people who put the lowball bids in are doing current shareholders a great service -- by preventing the hedge fund manipulators from pounding the stock down on low volume.

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