It's a remarkably fast and adaptive market that many intelligent people are exploiting individually for profit (or loss).
It's a total coinspiracy like most trades on exchanges are.
I have no doubt that it's somewhere between the two. But won't this discussion be low on facts and high on speculation? Licks of a tootsie roll pop.
Of course it's almost impossible to prove these "fake deals" i'm talking about, as an observer cannot retrieve information about current trading parties.
However - fake-deals might expose some specific phenomena in observable exchange data, which could be detected by an observer.
A possible benefit from such a hypothetical "fake-alarm": if alerted ppl stop trading for some time for instance - manipulating parties
could experience less profit or even some loss, whereas others prevent losses by avoiding their traps.