Guys, I have looked at the market depth and see that the size of the orders are too big to be from retail investors. I feel the actions have been suspicious. Any one knows how the ASX people target market manipulators? I can imagine that the big holders can manipulate the market both ways up and down. If you don't have new money coming in, it's not easy to pump stocks up. And it's impossible to take profit. So, the big holders can collude using several trading accounts. This help them to move the share price up or down and suck in retail investors who jump in for a ride but fail to get out. The big players use pro trading platforms where they can pre-program the computer software to sense market conditions and automatically put in sell or buy orders.
I see very large buy orders right now yet the price keeps falling slowly. Perhaps, some big players are just "oiling" the wheel of trading on AC8 to tempt the retail investors to come in with new money. They can set up for a later dump next week when their system can sense there are enough buying interest at the price they want to sell, then they unload a big number of shares. They probably did the pumping last year to get it to 1.80 to suck in new money. The trading fees would be insignificant compared to the money for the stock.
ASX has penalty for individuals manipulation low volume stocks for personal gain (pump and dump)
https://asic.gov.au/about-asic/news-centre/find-a-media-release/2015-releases/15-271mr-nsw-man-jailed-for-market-manipulation/I suppose the big players won't dare to do this individually. I wonder if some of them might collude to avoid the penalty.
I won't rule out that some fund managers actually think AC8 is now cheap and worth buying. I doubt they could keep their job buying from 1.80! Professional traders always have stop-loss exit points. They don't come in at 1.80 and get out at 40c!
