Take from it what you will but it is an interesting bit of manipulation as I see it which I've seen time and again. Here it is.

So I decided to do a bit of trading today and I managed to get in pretty near the bottom of a particular stock today....a bit of luck and some good old fashioned gut instinct and reflexes. When I put in my sell order I noted that the bid was a few hundred shares short of my sell volume, then suddenly it matched my volume....two pennies lower. I had moved in between the existing bid/ask. I didn't move to drop my price and then the bid that had risen to entice my move dropped out setting the sense that maybe I'd miss out on my sell and should drop my price. I didn't respond to that either. Next comes the squeeze from the top as another ask piles some shares onto my bid making it look like sellers are getting antsy. I didn't respond to that either. A bit of time goes by and those shares were removed....simply pulled. A few seconds later my ask is gobbled up and the sp moves a couple of pennies into the shares above mine. What was particularly interesting was the party/s involved, playing both sides of the bid/ask. The interesting thing is that the little black boxes can do this thousands of times a day as they can potentially remove pennies from each stock as they steer nervous traders into moves they unwittingly make.

You could say that this is just a convenient story, however, in a world that uses every persuasion to separate a fool and his money through advertising at the very least and all manner of other money traps/grabs, it's probably one of the easiest and lucrative ways of "legally" taking candy from the "babies". The Market. It's so easy to do. The news is rife with headlines to evoke any emotion they require...mostly fear when they want cheap shares....and then optimism when they want to sell their cheaply acquired shares. Stocks are cheap right now and if you look you'll see a lot of noteable orgs picking them up in spite of the doom and gloom. Now why would that be? The same old story...it's been working for an eternity.