Phisix Ends 2015 with Marking the Close Pump!

All actions have consequences. 

Price fixing actions or the ongoing blatant market manipulations at the Philippine Stock Exchange will have ramifications too.

While the consensus and or the establishment continue to deliberately ignore or overlook on the brazen misdeeds (largely because of the benefits from political-economic rent) transpiring at the PSE, eventually history will put into context the (untoward) effects of such price distorting actions. And current developments appear to already been indicative of such direction.

So my continued posting on these have been intended to expose on how manipulations will not only aggravate market distortions or exacerbate on the imbalances, but most importantly it will fail to attain the objectives and worsen the outcomes.

Today December 29 marks the end of the trading activities at the PSE for the year 2015.

After all the ‘this time is different’ boom scenario sold by the establishment from the year’s nascency, the PSE ended the year DOWN 3.85%. 

Virtually NO one in the consensus saw this coming as every ‘experts’ predicted the linearity of price momentum. Importantly the public was been blinded by media’s propaganda and statistical manipulation employed by the political order.

Of course, what makes 2015 remarkable has been the massive or intensive use of market manipulations. "Marking the close" has been the most frequently used index management tool. Yet there were other instruments used to massage the index, like afternoon delight pumps and panic buying during global selloffs. 

All these brought about a series of record highs which peaked in April 10 2015 at 8,127.48. Unfortunately, a short lived glory.

And even then, market manipulations were basically concentrated to a few issues or a rotational pump in 10 out of 15 biggest market cap issues even as HALF of the PSE universe had fallen to the domain of bear markets.

Eventually it turned out that despite the PSE’s censorship, corporate fundamentals had shown signs of deterioration as manifested by the negative NGDP growth and deficit in earnings of listed companies in 2Q.

Manipulations didn’t save the Phisix from the August 6.7% collapse, as with the negative annual returns for 2015.

Well anyway, what a way close 2015.

Marking the close again had been featured during the last two trading days of year (perhaps as part of window dressing)!

51% or 19.91 points of losses had been shaved at the pre-runoff to end Monday December 28’s trading session down by .27%.  

At Php 3 billion, Monday’s session highlighted the LOWEST volume since January 2014!

It’s no different today where 46% or 27.01 points of the intraday losses were pared down from marking the close.

What’s incredible has been that while the pump had been ostensible in all 5 major sectoral indices, it appears that only a few issues delivered the gist.

The major issues that buoyed the index from big losses were…

JG Summit which was pumped 2.8%! Negative suddenly became positive!

Robinsons Land was likewise pushed 1.3%! Again negative transformed into unchanged!

BDO was spiked by 1%! Same story negative morphed into positive!

From the peak of 8,127.48, the Phisix closed 2015 down 14.46%.

This shows that at the end of the day, manipulations will fail.

(charts above from colfinancial, PSE and technistock)