If the OP is saying the market is rigged to the upside then explain to me how it would be hard to make money being long the market. If he is "sure" the market is rigged, sounds like free money to me.
Well, the OP was claiming that the market is both rigged and hard to trade. I fail to see how he holds this belief.
My experience outside the financial markets is that rigging is sometimes hard to detect. Once detected, however, it is usually easy to derive a strategy to exploit it. My experience with the financial markets is insufficient for me to know how difficult rigging is to detect and how easy it is to exploit.
I don't have evidence that the market is rigged but in case it is it can also be hard to trade. For example, the easiest way of doing that is by creating high volatility. It makes it hard for position traders and expensive for option buyers. Actually, I think this is the only way the markets can be rigged. If volatility is low like now, it means IMO that the market is going up due to investor agreement about direction.
Well, nice to see the OP bailed on this thread. It was my understanding that the OP and the countless others on ET that claim that the equity markets for example are rigged to the upside, are rigging it to remove volatility and not increase it. Now if someone wants to say markets are rigged due the debasing of the dollar and printing of money therefore creating a flood of dollars into risk assets thereby removing volatility and creating a smooth upward curve in risk assets, then sure, I can go along with that. But then the to me that means the markets are easy to trade and make a fortune with. Just get long and stay long. Why start 100 threads saying the market is not tradeable.
Markets are not rigged. Those that need this (and other conspiracy theories) are themselves not trading or can't find a way to become successful through trading markets. No one here has any experience of the scale of intervention required to buy and hold a price in a futures market so that it does not fall below a prescribed level or to sell and hold a price so that it does not rise about a prescribed level. When previously a CEO of an investment bank brokerage house I had the account of the largest consumer of a particular commodity. They required hedging to protect them against rises in the price of the physical commodity. As a trusted and very successful operator I had almost unlimited discretion on the quantity I could use to intervene in the futures market. Now you can set a bottom which might turn out to be the bottom for the days trading; equally you could buy large scale in the futures market and your buying level may hold for 5 minutes or be absorbed quickly with little apparent effect. Anyone here who has no experience of futures and physical markets in the same commodity has no idea how difficult it is to rig a market and the sheer scale of intervention it requires and would require to be maintained. Thats aside from the fact that cornering or attempting to corner a market doesn't ultimately win. Trust me, as a big player you can make immense amounts of money in markets with strategies that use the movement in price forces (not attempts to restrict price from going in any particular direction).
Because basing trading on perceived instances of manipulation or betting on something being rigged is quite possibly the most retarded trading strategy of all time.
LOL. So you are saying the market is not rigged yet claim that you know for a fact at times you can hold up the market for a whole day and create the daily low.?!?!?!? That'll kinda effect a lot of traders don't you think? Everyone that doesn't hold overnight positions.... which is about 98% of futures traders I'd say.