Case in point: For 2 of the past 3 weeks, they were manipulating the closing price of AAPL & AMZN weeklies. This week, it was HPQ. For the entire day had a magical attraction to the price point of 28. Which in reality was the market making rats holding the price down. Why do the sewer-dwelling rats do this? While we don't know for sure, we can only think of those that benefit from this:
1. The market makers are so short-sighted for the few extra dollars they make, they're hurting the overall market.
2. The brokerages make a ton of money in commissions by assigning calls/puts. It's relevant to note here that only a few short years ago, the assignment threshold for In the Money options was $0.25. Meaning if a Put or call was in the money by $0.24, it would not be assigned. And a couple of years ago this assignment threshold was reduced to $0.05 and more recently to just a penny.
With a bunch of inept cronies running the SEC & CFTC, I'm not holding my breath waiting for the situation to be remedied.
The icing on the crap was the closing price at the end of the day for HPQ...
As you can see from the Time & Sale info provided by Schwab, the last trade at 3:59 & 4:00pm were above 28. But out of nowhere the closing price of HPQ for the day is 27.99. Looks like the Exchanges are 'in-the=game' as well and are ready to use a random number as the day's close, when the market makers have failed at the game.
