^^^^ Thanks John ... always enjoy your perspective!

I personally have manipulated a few individual stocks ... or so it seems :D.

Get yer 1500 shares of Enron here ... CHEAP!

LOL! Each time you buy those stocks crash. You never know you were the catalyst that kicks off a catastrophe.

Very interesting and thorough explanation, thanks, I love learning about this kind of thing, how the workings of any platform operate at a granular level.

Yup, on this is a manipulable casino. Which answers Shaun's question.

The players are like cats and the largest investors are the ones with laser pointers.

The stock market is a derivative of the credit market. Rates go up, stocks go down, and vice-versa. It is that simple. So by definition, it is manipulated by the credit market, which is controlled by the central banks who control the money supply. And everything is so leveraged on credit that a little change in the credit market can have big consequences on the stock market.

In the case at hand, traders were using the spread between credit rate in Japan and in the US to make easy money, with which they bought stocks on margin. When Japan central bank raised its rates a tiny bit, it caused a chain reaction that forced many traders to sell their US stocks, because everything is so leveraged, hence the sudden drop.

As Gregory Mannarino puts it, the whole financial system is a house of cards built on a pool of gasoline…it does not take much for the whole thing to burst into flames.