Yes, it was manipulation. From Tue-Thu, FINRA reported there were 2,136,450 shares sold marked as "ShortExempt", which means they were not located before being sold.
This would be illegal naked short selling except for the Market Makers Exemption (the "Madoff Rule"), which allows MMs to artificially (and without limit) increase the float even during times of high volume (when there is plenty of liquidity). This is an abuse of the exemption, which was intended to 'provide liquidity' but is now being used by unscrupulous parties to crash the SP while they scoop huge profits.
On Wed-Thu this week (in the middle of this bear raid), FINRA reported "ShortExempt" sales reached 9% of total shares sold short: (during a period of huge trading volume when
liquidity is NOT AN ISSUE).
View attachment 509185
This had the effect of
killing the sustained rally of Tue afternoon, and causing widespread panic selling amongst real shareholders (sorry
@Right_Said_Fred this is the illegal practice you got swept up in).
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This is market manipulation, pure and simple. Your hand waving attempt to explain it away does not change the reality, nor deal with the underlying problem:
Regulation SHO (see below).
Let's see if these anonymous MMs can locate all these naked short shares before they are legally required to report their activity in the
Failure to Deliver (FTD) report after 13 days. If these MMs are able to locate shares post hoc, it simply means legitimate investors were duped into selling their shares by the panic created by the dumping of millions of non-existant shares. If they can't locate shares, there are no consequences, and the actors involved remain anonymous.
Tell me again how this isn't manipulation? Where is the SEC?
Paging
@UncaNed @Hock1
Info:
@Fact Checking @KarenRei @lklundin
More here about the Market Maker's Exemption (Regulation SHO):
Regulation SHO | FINRA.org
Key Points About Regulation SHO
A final note: FINRA-reported volume is just a fraction of total trading on NASDAQ. During this week for example, FINRA reported a total volume of just 94,702,898 (
94.70M) shares, while we know that total NASDAQ volume was 208,823,482 (
208.8M) during that time (FINRA only reports numbers for Pre-Market and the Main Session, does not include the After-Market Session).
We have ZERO visibility into how much the rest of NASDAQ trading is sold short, or conducted under the short selling exemption. We do know that last week, we have no short selling information on
54.65% of all TSLA trades done on NASDAQ.
Think about what that means for Investor confidence and the transparency of the Market.