Exactly. With so many daytraders out there, it is much easier to make money ripping them off. Institutions nowdays complain very fast and file charges, so taking large position at the expense of a small fund or a heavy retail player has big consequences. Ripping off daytraders, no matter how blatant is risk free. Noone gives a sh*t about daytraders getting screwed. In liquid stocks, the specialists have little power in manipulation, they cant run down or run up a stock for days & weeks like they were able to decades ago. Even intraday, a liquid stocks has too many players going through several routes to make it easy for specialist to hold any control for any significant amount of time. Now in a thin stock, like one that does 100-200k a day, the number of players is limited. A specialist can run down this stock and run the stops to accumulate inventory from small astute investors and swing traders. Usually institutions overlook these low volume stocks. It happened to ESE prior to the breakout years ago, OS as the specialist tried for weeks to accumulate stock or TIE back in March 2005. Just some stuff I remember off the top of my head.