The price is wrong

“PAINTING the tape” is a time-worn, if disreputable, Wall Street tradition. It requires changing the perceived price of a company's shares, if only for a moment. Every so often, the practice reappears in the trading of “penny stocks”—cheap, rarely traded, shares. Years ago when volume was thinner, it was said to be common in blue chips too. The trick was to fool traders who tried to jump on the share-price movements being spat out by clattering ticker-machines. Regulators had some impact in reducing this kind of share manipulation. But the most effective deterrent was probably the increasingly large volume of trading in popular shares. Manipulators drowned in liquidity.