RE: Colonel Drake11 Sep 2019 17:49
I'm not sure of this practice 'spoofing and layering' but one thing is very obvious to me:
Many brokers cannot exectute trades very easily if there is a tiny offer in the market on L2 and so shorters and even market makers put lots of tiny offers in to cap the price.
E.g. this morning, they put literally dozens of 6,000 offers in the book at 8.11, 8.12, 8.13, 8.14 and so on, going all the way up to 8.3.
In this example, most brokers will only give a quote of anything below 8.11 and will only make a tiny offer e.g. 25,000 shares or even just the 6,000 shares. In a £70m cap stock, you should be able to get £25,000 quote and bid orders. Not a maximum of £500 orders!!! and so many people cannot physically buy and just walk away.
Whereas there are clearly 1m block orders below 8p that want to trade and have been there for weeks. So you could easily get your broker to sell into this but he won't make a price for 8.11as the orders are too small.
I've seen the same thing on SEAQ traded stocks where the mm's hold the price down e.g. bidding £25,000 but you can't even buy £500 worth. It is to encourage sellers and make the price look lower than it is and make it difficult for buyers to execute any trade. This should be illegal and the fca probably will make it be at one point this century.