Intraday gold price manipulation (10 am ET)

PMBug said:

More on today's digital hunger games:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-...was-so-furious-it-shut-down-cme-trading-again

It's like the Wild West out there.

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Gold dropped $25 in two minutes Friday morning following what appeared to be a single massive sell order, and professional traders are now pronouncing the sale a deliberate attempt to manipulate the market.

At 8:42 a.m. ET Friday morning, a firm appeared to sell 5,000 gold futures contracts "at the market," meaning at whatever price was available. The massive order was more than the market could take at once and led the CME to automatically halt trading for 10 seconds.

Eric Hunsader of Nanex told CNBC.com on Friday that 2,700 contracts were sold, which triggered the halt, and that the remaining 2,300 were sold once the market resumed trading.

Since one futures contract controls 100 troy ounces of gold, and each troy ounce was worth $1,285 at the time of the sale, this party was selling some $640 million worth of gold in one shot. And it overwhelmed the liquidity in the market.

"Anyone with knowledge of the size and volume in the market would absolutely never, ever place a 5,000 [contract] sell [order] at market, because you could not estimate the offset price," said iiTrader CEO Rich Ilczyszyn.
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