Hi All,

I had no intention of posting today as the volume was dead and the day relatively boring across the market I watch anyway. Low volumes, little movement. NOT barely scraped up 100K traded when I returned from lunch.

The last 10 minutes were quite something to see though. I have written musings in the past on the risks of setting a stop loss, so today we had a text book example.

Thanks to QQ for posting the trade listing. We can see from that there was one seller who had a stop loss (or equivalent margin call) for 50K shares and a trigger price at around 2.75. The next few minutes made a whole lot of traders days? Why?

They had stink bids in for most of the day and they were filled.

What is a stink bid? An open order that a person places that is much below market value. Given the right circumstances, such as a stop loss getting triggered, it actually might get hit.

When you see a day low of $2.46, especially with a close of $2.78 and a bid ask that is 8 cents higher than that on close, one naturally thinks, I should have bought.

But the action happens much too fast once the opportunity arrives. Which is why the open orders were filled all the way down and then the bulls bought back up, likely knocking off the asks of those just placing sells after seeing the dramatic drop.

Call it manipulation if you will, but I don't see it today. The price fell slowly on very low volume. A few may have shorted into the bid but with less than a 100K trading on a 130M share float, it was a dull day. The fact that somebody wanted to lose money on their 50K shares was not because of the market makers and funds. It was because of the decision of one person.

If you look at who was buying the shares from the seller from Pope, it was a mix of everybody. Even the buying on the rebound came from many different places. This was not manipulation. Just one bad decision and a lot of good decisions on those who set stink orders or acted quickly to buy up on rebound.

Today was not a risk free day, like any other day in the market. Those with stink bids could have easily lost their money if Noront had say, announced bankruptcy and suddenly the share price dropped to 3 cents (look at TAH (Tahera) for a good example of that). So even stink bids have their risks. But if you 100% believe in the company and know that $2.50 is an excellent buy for more shares, these bids sometimes get filled.

So we will have one person swear at the newspaper tomorrow morning when they find out their 50K were sold at a loss and a dozen or so buyers smiling tonight. In the end, it's all possible on any market. Noront is not exempt, especially on low volume days like today.

M1.