Andrew, I believe your observations are absolutely correct. Over the last 2 days in particular, I have also observed that everytime the stock seemed to be on the uptick, alot of size suddenly appeared on the offer, thus an uptick was followed by a wave of selling. On NASDAQ stocks, you can only short a stock on an uptick. For example, if you wanted to short (sell)10 pounds and the bid was 7 15/16 , your order would not execute until the bid upticked to 7 31/32 or 8. Based on what you have told me about which MM's were active on Level II, the usual short selling suspects ( eg NITE, FAHN, and Meyer Schweiz the frontman for Charles Schwab daytraders )seem to be at work.
My gut feel is there has been ALOT of short selling on technicals, especially since ANCR which showed up on the trader screens early in the week as a Top 100 hot stocks, then reversed and on Thursday night showed up on those same lists as a "negative breakout"..momentum trading in either direction becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because MM's take out the stop loss orders in a split second aka weak hand shakeout. I am very happy to see the filling of the gap, re-test, etc, and shorts come in. Join the party and get squeezed. LOL. |
