I've got quite a lot of sympathy for both of you (....hey, I can post again after my recent "knuckle-wrap" - thanks mprep !).

Otoh has taken up his market positions as suit him and wozzek has responded accordingly. The market depth and trading price simply aggregate the two.

As far as the use of the term "manipulation" goes, the fact is that Otoh has not been able to manipulate the market at all IMO. If he had, he would have been able to adopt his new positions without suffering an adverse market response. True manipulation is a whole order of magnitude more malignant - such as re-hypothecation in the paper gold market where you can actually prevent the market from functioning properly by creating fake supply.

I'd call what Otoh's doing "strategic positioning" to maximise his perceived investment.

Having said all that, I can see why smaller holders refer to this type of strategic positioning as "manipulation" because, relatively speaking, large holders are able to effect far bigger price movements than small holders are. It also tends to be regarded as a distortion of the "genuine" balance of supply and demand.

But lets examine this for a moment. What is the "genuine balance of supply and demand" ? We cannot know. We can never know what motivation lies behind all the orders up and down the length of a market depth chart. We can only see WHAT each market participant values the asset at, we can never see WHY they value it at that level.

At the end of the day, many people have a problem with swallowing the idea that markets are not democracies. They belong to whoever wants them the most - be that many small players or a few large ones. You just have to hope to f*ck that the larger players are benevolent, not malevolent and in that regard, Otoh's transparency has helped a great deal.

Markets function best when everyone makes up their own minds about how they value an asset and how they position their investments which is why I respect both Otoh's and wozzek's perspectives equally.