I think the difference between you and me is that I favor one side of the manipulations question and realize it is possible I may be wrong and that the answer is actually something quite different. Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but my impression is that you dismiss manipulations outright and always look for an alterative explanation. It'd do us good if you clarified your position. Thx.
My position is that while it is possible that manipulation happens sometimes, it is unlikely to happen regularly or recognizably because there are too many players in the market whose interests don't align. They are not friendly (actually, they're sharks, or maybe velociraptors) and would make far more money screwing each other than screwing retail investors. We have essentially no information at all on the short term "max pain" of individual players, so we have no way to know what they want. Aggregate knowledge tells us little or nothing.
If manipulation were recognizable, then predators would take advantage and nullify it, so it isn't. But the human brain is a pattern recognition machine, so even in the absence of patterns we imagine we see them. Ergo, all of TA. It's all garbage. You know this because it only works on the past, not the future (at least not at a rate greater than chance). And, amazingly (not), it turns out that when the stock price goes the way an individual likes then there's almost never a complaint of "manipulation", but when it doesn't....
All studies of the market have shown that short-term movements are unpredictable. When they are predictable, traders swoop in to take advantage and they become unpredictable again.
So, no, I don't believe there's much manipulation, I don't believe that it's always in one direction, and I don't believe that it's actionable even if present. And I believe that people who sagely explain why any stock did what it did that day (or any time in the past) are pretty much making it up. People who can successfully explain (read: predict) the future, on the other hand, are golden.
But, really, who cares what I think? I'm no expert. I can't predict the future and I can't explain the past, not with any consistency. I think the difference between us is that you think you can. You might want to test that belief, just in the interest of self-knowledge.
