Some interesting discussion from the "other" board. It looks like two traders were testing the mechanics of the SFIO ticker right now for themselves and discovered that NITE is all over the trading like white on rice. What I gathered from it was that NITE is basically manipulating the trading right now and probably has some sort of bot controlling orders which immediately drops an ask order down to whatever bid that comes in for the number of shares it needs to execute the retail buy order regardless of any higher asks that are out there. Basically they are intercepting any bids that come in so they can eat them up and remain as the only bidder and seller in the stock, which artificially creates a market with themselves in the stock. Why would they want to do this? Well, we can only guess but I think its not too far off base to imagine that they may be shorting shares to immediately sell off to any bid that comes in, they must feel confident that whatever puny bids that come in will be small enough for them to discard with newly shorted shares. Just look at the most recent bi-weekly short interest, it has gone up considerably in recent months. Short interest now 1,745,000 shares with 8 days to cover. It seems to insinuate that NITE is looking to do everything it can to keep the share price down for extended periods of time. Why? Possibly because if they have a gigantic failure to deliver naked short position the margin exposure of that position once multiplied by the current share price would trigger the RegSHO threshold and require the necessary close-out obligations, but that would only happen if the price remained high, above a certain threshold, for over a certain time frame, 13-consecutive days or 35-consecutive days depending on the nature of the situation.
They may even have a small inventory of shares they can use to sandbag any incoming bids but its not entirely clear, the trades could just be electronic entitlements (IOUs) and since they dont have to report short metrics with a globally locked stock they just can just short any bids that come in, as long as a non-DTC clearing house is used. This has been going on for over a year now so in my opinion the SEC and FINRA need to halt all the trading and require all firms who have any positions on the books to settle and clear the trades and phantom shares that may exist. How long can this game go on without any regulatory enforcement and the SEC just giving inquiring investors the run-around? NITE needs to do the right thing and settle this fiasco, now.
Just recently the SEC caught a firm obtaining newly issued shares from over 100 penny stock issuers and then dumping them immediately, selling unregistered shares, into the market place. Many on the boards seem to always point the finger at executives, insiders and the company as regards illicit unregistered shares with no legend getting sold into the market diluting shareholders causing DTC global locks, but it looks like large firms are doing it; see link. Hmmmmm...