From your daily chart thread (thanks for that, great service to the community!):
That was on a day with max pain at $215. I can believe that manipulation was in play trying to push the price down but the people doing that were not motivated by shorting Tesla, but by maximizing their gains on options and as to a tug of war. I don't think so. No one would be foolish enough to try to push the price up against someone attempting to do the opposite. I think the tug of war is actually buyers buying on dips.
As to trying to harm Tesla to harm Elon or to damage Tesla to make it difficult raise money again I disagree.
Paying shills is a cost effective way to do that. Spending tens of millions of dollars on a daily basis is not.
Bottom line? There's more manipulation happening than I initially thought (thanks!), but IMO much less than you think.
It's tough to determine sometimes whether there's manipulation taking place or the trading is simply longs and shorts trading with no gamesmanship involved. What tips the balance, I think, is when volume is low and one investor plans to buy or sell enough shares that the stock price will respond to that one individual's trades. If you are such a big player that you're capable of moving the SP with your individual trades, then it is illogical to not employ gamesmanship from time to time. I agree with you that the vast majority of trading is simply longs and shorts trying to maximize their profits. The goal of using gamesmanship in trading is to maximize profits, though, so we're really not talking about different motivations here, just different tactics to achieve profits.
On the other hand, since at least one enemy of EVs, the Koch Brothers, have funds set aside for FUD, it's not inconceivable that someone like this might dabble in TSLA stock when they see an opportunity to simultaneously make some money and do Tesla some harm. There are times, such as right after the autopilot fatality, that a depressed stock price could send signals to both Wall Street and future Tesla buyers, plus give Elon Musk a black eye. I see potential motivation, but I would agree with you that such trading is probably not common.
One thing I look for is patterns, and one pattern that has emerged recently is gains on TSLA during the high-volume times of day and decreases in the SP during the low-volume afternoon hours. Is this the work of gamesmanship by the shorts? It's nearly impossible to know for sure, but sometimes i mention it because that explanation strikes me as the most plausible. My rule is to consider normal profit-making activities of longs and shorts first, but then look at gamesmanship when normal trading does not make sense as an explanation. For example, when we see TSLA spending a good portion of the day jumping up and down between green and red, with just a dollar or two gains and losses, then I suspect manipulation because of the strong motive (get TSLA to close in the red) and because normal trading doesn't make sense as an explanation after a few gyrations. Why would this battle be taking place right at the red/green line? I agree with you that TSLA starts heading up because longs buy in at what looks like an attractive price, but why does it descend, again and again, after climbing just a dollar? One explanation is that it keeps hitting a sell-target set by longs, but after several repeats this explanation doesn't make as much sense as the manipulation explanation.
