"Painting the tape" comes from the days of ticker tapes. There are certain patterns in graphs and, equivalently, "the tape" that (we hope) predict the stock price in the future. When the guys on the floor rig trades, do them out of order, bunch them up in volume or time, buy and sell out of "special" accounts, et cetera, to make it look like a certain pattern is developing, when it really isn't, that's called painting the tape. It's a fake-out to get the rest of us thinking that a certain move is happening or about to happen.
"Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" is a great book written in the 1920's that should be required reading for everybody who thinks the markets aren't manipulated.
BTW, the last trade today is generally being noted as 72 5/8. Time & Sales info shows that this was a 200-share trade following two at-the-close trades of 30K+ shares at 74 5/8, which were probably mutual funds putting new money to work.
Either that 72 5/8 is an innocent typo or it's a perfect example of tape-painting: if it isn't corrected by tomorrow morning, it looks like MU took a big dump today (true enough) without recovering much. We saw just a few days ago that somebody got nailed big-time the next morning by relying on that kind of bogus closing price. |
