Alternative Trading System

Finance a la shmoop what is painting the tape?

all right tape as in ticker tape should be white with black letters and numbers [New York Stock exchange ticker tape appears]

on it and that's it painting it is clearly a sign that you're painting over

something or hiding something and in fact painting the tape is an illegal way

to try and manipulate stock prices in essence it works like this

Moe and Larry decide that if they show tons of volume

suddenly traded in a given stock that "somebody will think something's up"

like a takeover is coming yeah yeah that's the ticket [Moe speaks to Larry]

Google's buying them for a big price for sure and note that painting the tape is

actually a common phenomenon in social media since those stocks are ones that

they talk about where one lonely bitter and angry former postal worker can buy a [Man panting at a computer]

dozen old used Dell computers to be that social media promulgator and those

tie differently into the internet with different IP addresses so that remotely

it looks like they're owned by twelve different people with twelve different

opinions all coming at you at the same time recommending you buy this stock or

sell that stock right well that blogger a social media person then posts on a [Social media post of basketball game appears]

given topic like curling sucks and then their second fake account replies yes of

course it does curling is for idiots and their third

account replies, well curling should be banned from the Olympics you see that

guy's gut and well you get the idea things get incendiary in the stock

market this way as well so if Moe and Larry trade tons of shares [Moe and Larry throwing shares at each other]

back and forth and a big spike of volume lots of other institutional investors

like the big ones may be enticed to buy in and then they drive the stock from

say twelve bucks a share to eighteen at which point Moe and Larry will get out

having made a fast tidy and very illegal profit they would have painted the [Moe and Larry celebrate as money falls on them]

ticker tape to look like there was tons of activity on it

tons of exciting takeover rumors and other forces to make the stock go up up

up with lots of demand from investors all over the world when in fact

there wasn't they were clearly fishing for someone else to come in and bid [Stock on a fishing line appears]

things up so that they could sell make their dough and move on to some other

scheme and well here's where that scheme usually ends you up....