88888 ?, page-30

trade4profit> I really don't know where to start with this, what your interest is here beyond trying to be the HC police is beyond me.

Firstly, I have never placed an order containing all 8's, or an order to bring the total depth of either buy's or sells up to any level of 8's in my life.

Next point would be, you continue to mention ASX in regards to market manipulation etc. ASX as a private company does not prosecute for market manipulation and violations of rules. The regulatory body who investigates and prosecutes is ASIC.

My partner is a banking and finance lawyer at a major who has sat across the bench from ASIC on numerous occasions, and I discussed this story of 8's in detail with her last night.

To quote;

"I would suggest you spend a few moments on a quick refresher of the ASX rules regarding market manipulation...particularly the part on generating false markets and spreading of rumours."

To prove market manipulation in this case would be an impossible job for ASIC and not something they would be likely to pursue. Firstly, the placing of orders containing 8's or bringing total depth to multiple 8's is perfectly legal based on many factors (as you pointed out), so your contention point is this coupled with the spreading of rumours/false markets.

The only posts I have seen both here and ANP regarding this issue are ALL subjective, with the most direct accusation being its done by some kind of "pump gang". Now should a person place the orders, then come on here claiming its done by a pump gang and the price is going to rise, how do you think ASIC will argue this in court? That person or persons may well consider themselves a "one person pump gang" and quite legitimately believe they are so. There is no open and shut case here, its not like someones come on and said, "Oh the 8's indicate a big takeover is happening next week".

If ASIC wanted to pursue prosection over this (and the few tens of thousands of dollars of trades it may or may not have generated), they would have one hell of a battle on their hands. I suggest you do some research into similar prosecutions of this manner involving ASIC and see how they turned out, I would imagine you'll have a seriously hard time finding any.

As for this;

"Just a friendly reminder that there is no anonymity in the market...or the forums."

There may be no anonymity in the markets per say, but anonymity on the forums is entirely possible, and very easy. If a person was to go as far as risking pontential prosecution over this (i.e. generating returns beyond a few thousand $$$), then using a legit IP address would be foolish. Possible things they could do here would be, using a private VPN, IP spoofers, or even as simple as their neighbours Wifi. The only possible way to be tracked then is via a lengthy MAC address process, but once again, MAC addresses can easily be regenerated to a dummy.

It is understandable that as the #1 favourite poster on HC you will generate a lot of support, but what position do you hold that means you should be going around issuing "warnings".

To summarise;

"I cannot however think of genuine reasons for putting such orders in the market (or any orders for that matter), and take them in and out of the depth all day...over and over...or using orders for bid stacking that are not genuine buy/sell orders. I also cannot see a genuine reason for placing any order, then spreading rumours about it (or even just mentioning it), in order to generate discussion and/or potential interest.

I am pretty sure the ASX would view the latter as having dubious intent."

Just because you can't see a genuine reason, doesn't make it a prosecutable offence by ASIC (once again, ASX does not investigate this stuff).