Apparently this investor desires to own Turkish stocks more than other people want to own Turkish stocks. If a hypothetical party wants to own Turkish stocks more than this investor, there are a variety of people who presently hold Turkish stocks who would be happy to oblige.
Most reporting on the markets is really, really boring when you get right down to it. "He's high-frequency trading! And placing big, risky bets! And who even knows if it's a he?!" sells a lot more papers than "Investment fund purchases stock legally on the open market; chooses not to broadcast intention to do so by using smoke signals but instead uses a computer."
Whoever it is seems to have skipped from one local brokerage to the next honing his system and turning the latest, Yatirim Finansman, into the biggest net buyer on the market by far. YF is elsewhere explained to have represented ~2% of the market prior to this actor deciding to use it as his brokerage.
It is very difficult for me to credit a market maker with that sort of impact on net buys, unless the market maker is very, very, very bad at their job.
With his funds he's able to influence stock price movements, which others then respond to. For instance, you buy into a stock, the price jumps suddenly. Other traders, not knowing if there's some inside information or whatnot, pile in, just in case. You quietly get out, take the profits.
IANAL: Buying something you think is cheap is legal, even if you know your buying it will push the price up as a side effect (any big order will move the price, if you want to buy or sell a lot it's basically impossible to do that without affecting the price). Selling it afterwards because you think the price has gone up to more than the asset is worth is legal. What's not legal is deliberately manipulating the price, and it can be hard to tell the difference from the outside. Some traders' moral instinct is that if you're taking on the risk (i.e. if you're putting your orders out there for a while where you're going to trade if anyone wants to) then it must be legitimate, which has a certain intuitive appeal but is not the current law.
There's nothing wrong with it, as long as you're influencing prices only with your own funds, not conspiring with others or trading on information which you're not supposed to trade on.
On smaller exchanges with less liquidity you see it all the time. If average trading volume is 20k shares, buy 50k and you will move the price. Then sell in small blocks, maybe through multiple brokers...
This is basically what happens with company 401ks. It is totally legal, although op claims about getting out "quietly" are kind of absurd. The sell orders are available for everyone to see (and bid on).
This is basically what happens with company 401ks.
In the reality most of us inhabit, a 401k is a type of company-sponsored retirement account. The accounts are allowed to invest in a variety of securities, most commonly in one of a limited selection of mutual funds. There is no circumstance under which 401k contributions materially move the market.
If I sound mildly put out in this comment, it is because HN comments about the stock market often make very confident claims which bear only the most tenuous connection to reality. It's as if someone on a Wall Street message board had asked "Why is Chrome faster than Internet Explorer?" and received the answer "Because it is written in Unicode."
And outside the scope of this particular comment, often times responses like "Chrome is not, in fact, written in Unicode. Unicode is an imprecise name for part of a family of methods of encoding text in various human languages, not a programming language. A substantial part of Chrome, including most of the rendering engine, UI layer, and network stack is written in C++; Chrome also makes heavy use of other languages internally. Returning to the question of why Chrome is fast: this is less about language choice and more because substantial effort has been taken to ensure that Chrome is fast. 'Fast' is a complicated topic in browsers. In terms of user-visible performance, one thing which makes browsers seem fast is the Javascript runtime. Chrome uses V-8, a run-time built specifically for Chrome at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, which is optimized for speed." are met with "Sure that's what you would say IF YOU WERE A GOOGLE SHILL."
I guess I could have explained that better. What I was trying to express is that money managers who are working with very large sums of money have difficulty getting out of very large positions.
Some companies have 401ks plans that are working with very large sums of money. This problem doesn't apply to all 401ks. This wasn't the best example.
Um... not sure what to do with your comments on the shill ecosystem.
FACEBOOK INC A
BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC CL A
WELLS FARGO & CO
ALPHABET INC CL A
APPLE INC
AMAZON.COM INC
ALPHABET INC CL C
VISA INC CL A
STARBUCKS CORP
NIKE INC CL B
% of Total Portfolio 31.30%
I guess a worst case scenario is one of the core assets went out of business. The asset portfolio doesn't stay static- if you look at the site above, it says that these are the assets as of a specific date.
You buy one big block, say 50% of daily volume. Then you move the shares around, in the next few sessions sell smaller blocks through multiple brokers. The key is to buy enough volume to move the price, not so much to make exiting the position difficult. I don't do things like this, but I did see it on lower-liquidity exchanges all the time, and used to trade in small caps where a $10K bid could move the price ~5%... And if I was motivated to sell, the best bet was to break it up into smaller pieces, and sell over the course of a session or two. If daily volume is 50K, and I want to sell 20K, I can't put it all up at once.
Also, on a typical exchange like the NYSE, HKex, Euronext Paris, etc..., the volume is so large you generally don't even bother to look at who's buying or selling. On smaller exchanges you're constantly glued to the screen, looking at the sellers, trying to guess what they're up to.
I imagine company 401ks are managed by in a fairly conservative way. Big positions in fundamentally solid large caps, holding for a long time, selling only when you need to cash out or the price moves beyond a certain range. Traders basically manage their trades in the exact opposite fashion - short, extremely speculative trades, no regard for fundamentals, on smaller exchanges you mess with people's emotions, etc...
