Closing Shorted Positions via Short Ladder Attacks

Question

From my understanding in a short ladder attack investors bid lower and lower prices to drive down the stock value. I assume in many cases this will scare retail investors into selling further compounding the downward price.
Specifically, in the case of GME last week the price went from ~468 to ~120 in nearly a hour. My question is why wouldn't hedge fund investors keep doing this until they can close there shorted positions at a profit?
Apologies if this a trivial question. All the hype around GME this past week has really gotten me interested on the mechanics/strategies use in investing.

Bob Baerker · Answer

My guess is that some Redditor or YouTuber concocted  the strategy of a 'short ladder attack' to convince people to hold their long positions.  Somewhere on Reddit there's an explanation that in a 'short ladder attack', hedge funds lower their bids and trade shares with each other, fooling algorithms and temporarily driving price down.  This is utter nonsense.

The National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO) is a Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) regulation requiring brokers to trade at the best available (lowest) ask price and the best available (highest) bid price when buying and selling securities for customers.

Any buy order at a price less than NBBO goes on the order book as a limit order at a lower price.  The same holds true for a seller whose price is above NBBO.  The only way that traders can move price is with more buying (or selling) volume that takes out the available supply at current price.
The reason that GME went from ~$468 to ~$120 in nearly a hour was a combination of profit taking and additional shorting (if shorting was still allowed that day).  No one can drop share price by trading under the market (NBBO).

Closing Shorted Positions via Short Ladder Attacks

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