James719, the study of markets, market makers, penny stocks, manipulation is a full time job in of itself. I am not the best person to analyze this or any other penny stock. I have my opinions, and I think they are shared by many here about why this stock is where it is.
The main reason we are where we are is that the company has over the past year consistently failed to live up to expectations that they put forth. "Over promise / Under deliver". I think that is about to change though, thanks in no small part to Bull's efforts.
Now, that being said, in my opinion, there are forces out there (the dark side) that do manipulate this stock, and many other penny stocks. There are many many stories out there about market manipulation, and if you do some searches you'll find lots of material to peruse about how it is done. I do believe there is NSS (Naked Short Selling) that goes on here, I believe there are market makers who work together to keep the price down during mini rallies. I've seen times where there were buys going through at one price, quickly buying out a block being offered by one market maker, only to have a small block offered up at fractionally below what the previous block was offered, someone snaps that up, then there is another block offered up a bit lower than the second lot. This tends to stall the rally as people view it as the price having reached its peak, then someone may sell at a lower price to avoid being "stuck" with shares at a higher price, thereby killing any momentum to the upside.
If you look at intraday charts of TECO over the past 6 months, and I've pointed this out numerous times, some "entity" sells at 11:30ish very consistently. Why would someone always sell at that time? This is usually 5-10% below what the price was up to that point. IMO this is done to try and push the price down prior to lunch time. Then anyone checking TECO during their lunch break sees that it's down (again) and says to themselves "This thing is always going down.", and never pulls the trigger to buy it.
The thing we as shareholders need is some news that brings in a lot of new buyers, to ramp up the volume. Manipulation can't stall a major upswing in volume, especially if there are a lot of NSS shares out there, and if there is some very good news, those "holding" short shares will have to scramble to cover, thereby helping to fuel the upswing.
TECO needs to produce PERIOD. Then they can start taking the "Under Promise / Over Deliver" approach, and this will stabalize, and grow.
Look I'm no expert, FAR from that. If I were, I wouldn't be this far in the red with this one. At the moment I need .032 to get to even. There are more that a few here who are in the same boat or worse. One PR stating that they have commercial quantity of oil in Belize will do it IMO. Ramping up production here in the US to 100+ bpd would do it too. Let's go!
guess I don't need any more coffee.
