Judging from his hours, he&#8217-s based in the US.

We see you on the bid again, and your cosmetic offers as well. You are the whale in this market, but it&#8217-s a small pond. Be careful.

More details on this strange trading later&#8230-

Addendum:

Exhibit A: a view of trading known as &#8220-market profile&#8221- from March 1st through the 7th. Price is on the y-axis and volume is on the x-axis, instead of time. What typically develops on these charts are sideways normal-distribution-like patterns, which is unsurprising by the central limit theorem. Often, a jump to a new mean corresponds to an event. The pattern below is unheard of in liquid markets, except in risk-arb and other &#8220-peg&#8221–ish situations.

What first comes to mind is that the exchange is manufacturing volume with bogus &#8220-wash&#8221- trades, but the first time 33.3 printed (which is where half of the volume for March occurred as of yesterday), the price had been in the teens, and 33.3 marked an all-time high for the contract. This doesn&#8217-t make sense as fake volume nor some sort of internal initialization trade relating to TEN&#8217-s restructuring.

Yesterday&#8217-s trading suggests that a single buyer is pushing the market up and is currently successfully holding it at 40 while posting offers to appear as a passive market-maker. 1-2000 buy orders remained near 40 until about 10pm EST yesterday and returned this morning, EST. In these thin markets, this is quite a lot especially considering the high price level &#8212- and it is high since it&#8217-s almost a year before the first primary. Of course the recent buyer might be unrelated to whoever caused the anomaly at 33.3. To be continued..

Addendum:

After taking the weekend off, our buyer was back by 10am EDT this morning. He has to defend 33.3 which shouldn&#8217-t be too difficult considering that there are only 3 major candidates. Truth be told, 40 isn&#8217-t that high for this contract, and the price does more-or-less reflect recent polls, but this guy is awfully confident. There is a fine line between a manipulator and an overconfident trader who is too large for the market.