Stop loss hunting & fishing for liquidity Stop loss hunting trap:
You will avoid the shake out trap if you understand the mechanics behind short selling. Hedge funds walk away with billions every year from hard working Canadians trying to prepare for their retirement. They place orders as little as 1 share at decreasing prices until the price drops significantly enough to trigger stop loss orders that some unsuspecting retail investors automatically place to protect their downside. Example: I place 15 sell orders at strategic times (when liquidity is very low, at the beginning or end of the trading session)
1- sell 50 shares at 1.77
2- sell 50 shares at 1.75
3- sell 50 shares at 1.74
4- sell 50 shares at 1.72
5- sell 50 shares at 1.71
6-sell 50 shares at 1.80
7-sell 10 shares at 1.68
8-sell 50 shares at 1.67
9-sell 50 shares at 1.65
10-sell 50 shares at 1.62
11-sell 50 shares at 1.61
12-sell 1 share at 1.60
13-sell 5 shares at 1.66
14-sell 50 shares at 1.65
15-sell 12 shares at 1.60
By sacrificing a few shares at a discount hedge funds can trigger the sale of thousands if not millions of dormant shares owned by naive retail investors who placed stop loss orders on them and that brokers and short sellers are happy to scoop up to cover their shorts and hoard them for when the stock starts rising up again.
Short sellers use derivatves like put options and futures to manipulate the underlying stock all under the radar.
Fishing for liquidity
Imagine being a farmer looking for water. You start digging a well. 10 meters deep no water, 20 meters deeper still no luck so you keep digging deeper and deeper hoping to find enough water to justify the investment and time spent digging. Now imagine a bunch of short sellers who sold millions of shares short and are digging/fishing for stop loss orders or people who will be forced to sell at a certain price (those who bought on margin and can't honour repeated margin calls for more cash as the price keeps going down…) that will allow them to cover their shorts. Short sellers will do anything to push, force or convince you to sell because they are sitting on millions of shares that they must buy to cover their short positions.
Imagine that I assume that there are enough shareholders that will be shaken out if the price is low enough.