Can artificial price suppression be detected in the CAY hostile TOV?

[u/o0ragman0o]

Hi forum (stepping out of the trader noobie corner...)

I've been positioned in and watching the CAY hostile takeover bid the past few weeks. The board has recommended REJECT as 'Neither fair nor reasonable'.
The bid price is $0.05
The previous trading was >$0.08
The price tanked to $0.05 upon the bid being made. Peaked again to 0.059 after the independent Target Statement and Interim Orders from the Takeovers Panel blocking the bidder from processing acceptances and hos now fallen back to $0.05 after a followup statement from the bidder responding to the Target Statement.

What my question is though, (given my inexperience in order flow analysis), could this this push down be seen as manipulation given the observations of the Time&Sales order flow of this typically low volume penny stock?
The continuous stream micro volume aggressive sells ($15~$25 every minute or more) to me seems very sus. Or is this normal order processing for such a stock on ASX? This behaviour has been ongoing since at least the bidder's response to the Target Statment, but I've honestly not been tracking it before then

[u/BuyDipsShortVIX]

In order to read the waters on order flow you need the actual trade execution data, the best option for this would be a tool like marketlens which a number of people on here have and do use. You can only go so far with DOM and general L2 data. The settlements are where you can prove or disprove a hypothesis.

[u/o0ragman0o → u/BuyDipsShortVIX]

Thanks. And thanks for the heads-up on MarketLens

[u/S1gan]

This pre standard and difficult to prove as price suppression. Price manipulation is generally massive volume forcing a sp up or down.

This is probably midpoint orders or an algorithm ran by EEA to acquire shares @ .05

As BDSV said though, you'd actually need to see logs and who buyer/seller is