RE: Can someone explain to me howBringing the price down is either selling or shorting, period.
In this case it appears to be shorting. Why? Well because if you or I wanted to unload stock we would let the momentum build i.e. good news release and gently sell into it. In this case, house 1 and house 33 didn't let any momentum build, in fact, they went out of their way to ensure that some of the retail investors and day traders went home with empty pockets. In the next couple of days the short position will be available, we will know for sure then.
Shorting takes place largely for one of two reasons:
1.) If a company is over valued astute investors will short and in fact cover or buy the shares at a lower price, taking home the difference.
2.) If some party(ies) are interested in accumulating a position in a company via stock in the open market or forcing a company to do a financing, shorting can be used to trash the companies SP.
A short squeeze is used to screw the shorts. An example of this could be that Canaccord wanted to short AOS to kill the SP thinking that they could pick-up the shares cheaply (as us retailers sold) and be in a position to get a cheap financing with AOS (as no big news is fore casted until drill results). The squeeze comes into play when AOS mgmt. and some institutional get together buying stock driving the SP up, eventually the shorters have to cover at a huge loss which drives the SP even higher.