I'll preface this question with saying I'm new around here so please forgive my ignorance. Why does the price not rise and rise fast when there are a lot more people bidding then asking? Isn't that the same as buying and selling? We have a lot of people trying to buy and few people trying to sell yet we seem to be going nowhere but down slowly?
shortcovering? =\
I've got a lot to learn. I have no idea what that is.
I don't know a whole hell of a lot about how price manipulation takes place exactly, but some of those order walls that you see on Bitstamp are fake, and they are used to attempt to push the market in one direction or another by creating appearances.... ... But the phenomenon that I am describing does NOT really directly answer your question.
The other thing that seems to occur is that bots will continue to add sales on an ongoing basis to keep the price from rising. These bots can only accomplish this in a meaningful way, if the actual trade volume does NOT become too high b/c once the trade volume becomes too high, it may become too unprofitable to operate bots in such a way.
To me, there seems to be quite a bit of manipulation going on, and in this regard there is likely some of the trade activity that is taking place at a short-term loss but may be calculated to be long-term profitable.