JC - KRY has been mostly a retail investor stock (as much as 80%) at times. Retail investors are for the most part very poor investors. I don't mean to sound stuffy, but historically most retail investors buy at the top and sell at the bottom.

For a stock like KRY, if you are a hedge fund or institution, you need to scare retail investors into selling (panic) right at the point they should be buying so you can get your large blocks purchased at a great price.

How is that done? A couple of ways. A hedge/institution gives a large order to a MM/specialist. His job is to fill it as best he can at the best price and rarely if ever all at once.

Mostly that is done by thrwoing large ASK lots up and scaring the dumb retail investors who happen to have access to level II. They see 100k shares on the ask and little on the bid. Remember that MM's don't have to show their whole order book. You see that when lots of sells go off but the Bid doesn't change much or keeps replenishing then the ask large lot disappears (order done).

But that is not often enough so the "theory" is that some employ people to log onto financial message boards and trash the stock or talk about they are now selling. This can casue the retail investors who do no DD but rely on message boards for info. They se the doom and sell in a panic.

I never believed the paid basher idea, but have become a believer. I'd say 80% of the bashers on Yahoo are just people getting jollies, but you can see some that post hundreds of posts every day and they provide snipets of facts to paint the picture they want. This goes on all day and when others log on and use the same pasted material.....

Who would spend all day everyday 24 hours on a message board and utilize PR's, facts and such if they had no interest? Even if they were short why would they spend so much time on it?

I have come to believe that they exist and are paid with a purpose of painting a very negative view of a stock to drive down the price through scared retail investors. They are careful not to comitt blatant SEC violations but they skirt it. YHOO is very susceptable to this because they have little monitoring and using multiple ID's easy.

If retail investors just did their own DD or at the very least if they would verify all news with links and facts (good or bad), this problem would not exist. To be fair, there are also likely paid pumpers who try to raise the price for majors who want to sell large lots.

WOW, I'm exhausted.