Well you are right in that the opening part of the session saw only about 1M shares or so take the PPS up a couple of ticks to 0.0022/0.0023 which indeed is very low volume but then from about 11AM to 11:30AM there was a spike in volume (about 25M) which led to a brief spike in the PPS to the highs of the session (0.0026/0.0027) and then back down to 0.0023/0.0024 for the rest of the day on scattered volume. There is no way to tell if shorts were covering this morning or during any of the upswings in PPS but what we do know is that the biweekly short interest is and has always been effectively nil so the huge level of daily shorting we are witnessing every day for months must be getting covered very soon after if not the very next day or on the same day by MMs. If the shorting/covering operations are closing long/short trades during the day or within a day (consisitently) then I cannot imagine anyone could argue against the notion that the volume and PPS movements we see are merely illusions; as you put it, "artificial volume". The only other possibility is that most or all of the "trades" are in fact real retail investors buying and selling but the MMs not having the immediate liquidity to fulfill those transactions and so they short sell in order to execute their clients trades and then within T+3 they come back into the market and buy to cover and deliver real shares into their client accounts, but we have already seen in real time no less that the daily "action" does not add up and so we cannot exactly conclude that this is the case. What seems more likely is that the market manipulators are at their business as usual tactics with a two pronged approach; spin innuendo and lies and doubt on message boards to confuse and fool hard working retail investors out of their money if they can and also spin the gears of the stock so fast and hard that it appears hordes of traders are in and out of the stock so much that real fortunes are being made and lost each day and so the only way to properly "play" RFMK is to "ride the pump and dump". Of course, not surprisingly, this foolhardy strategy is what is boasted and pushed about on many boards we see across the internet scum swamp.
IMO likely what we really are witnessing is just a whole lot of hot air getting pushed around between market playas in collusion with each other to whip naive ragdoll retail traders into the vortex, churn them and chew them up and spit them out for a profit. If you sit down at a poker table with 10 players including you and 8 of them are billionaires and you decide to go all in on the one other player who has about the same stack as you, I wish you good luck because you will likely need all the luck in the world since all the billionaires will likely move all in all together anytime any of the small fish fry decide to make a move. "Providing liquidity" is perfectly legal according to the SEC. Most of the SEC regulators go on to acquire jobs at the very financial firms they are supposed to be regulating so any talk of piling up FTDs, naked shorts or market manipulation via artificial volume, etc, is just laughed at and thought to be a myth. This is business as usual in the market place and it occurs in practically every single stock and investment vehicle on the market, its just with the pinkies the "action" is much more easily spotted because of the lack of real level of money "trading hands" in these tickers.
Stay sharp out there. You must unlearn what you have learned.
GLTY
$RFMK
